The Buffalo Bills have won the AFC East. This is not a printing error.

The Bills won a lot of this division then. The NFL was different. The New England Patriots were regularly quite grumpy.

Buffalo back to the top? It feels like a step back and a breath of fresh air. If you know and like a Bills fan, especially a Bills fan who has a lot of patience, who is proud but also a little obsessed with the whole life experience, call to congratulate him. Maybe it’s not the first Sunday, maybe they were at Buffalo airport, cold, greeting the team, like a bunch of others, but call.

What if: named. Do not send text messages. You might even call a rotary dial phone or a brick-shaped Nokia to keep a 90s vibe.

We should talk about how they got there. There is nothing strange about this template. The Bills have been a team on the sidelines for a while, often in a bewildering way: being a Bills fan in recent years has been experiencing flashes of hope and then seeing these flashes ritually crushed, but in this disturbed pandemic, no Fans of the Covid Chaos season finally made the leap, establishing themselves not only as a division class, but as a potential Super Bowl rival.

Yes, I said so. Yes, I know the Kansas City bosses have their opinion. The Bills are 11-3, my friends. They are absolutely legitimate. I’m just reporting facts.

They’ve done a lot in the arms — and legs — of Josh Allen, his robust 24-year-old 6-foot-5 quarterback from the University of Wyoming through Reedley College, who, in his third year, and not without hesitant formative learning, he has been shown not only to be the kind of quarterback who can handle a football game, but he also has moments of good faith, to measure, Moments by Josh Allen, Josh Allen doing the kind of thing that only Josh Allen does. He had some of them in Saturday’s thrashing of Denver, in which he threw a couple of touchdowns, and also ran for a pair, including a 24-yard touchdown early in the second quarter.

Allen is a new kind of thrill, but the whole Buffalo team is like that: intriguing, not the same family member. Stefon Diggs, a wide receiver acquired from Minnesota, has given Allen a steady main goal. Bills defense gains strength and is achieved as the weather gets cold. Sean McDermott, the head coach of the 10th Bills since Marv Levy resigned after the 1997 season, has impressively relied on last year’s 10-6 playoff wildcard campaign. Coaches Brian Daboll (offensive) and Leslie Frazier (defense) are likely to have a head coaching look this winter.

And surely we should also talk about it, because its sudden downfall is a factor in this story: the Patriots, the usual heavyweights of the Eastern AFC, are in a year of rebuilding, or at least what for to them it’s a year of rebuilding, as Tom Brady has evoked and Bill Belichick’s team has come in on Sunday by 6-7 and, at best, has played a long tie.

It was the Patriots, with Brady and the captain of the ship Grumpy Lobster, who won the AFC East the last 11 times and 16 of the last 17 times, routinely sucking the soul of the promising Bills (and Dolphins, and Jets) and doing regional dominance seems like a tedious task. A fall from the Patriots felt inevitable, but it sure took forever.

Still: Buffalo’s story is more of a story of a rise than a fall. You can only touch the spread hand. The Bills did not send Brady to Tampa. Buffalo had to capitalize and they did.

It’s a minor offense against the Football Gods that none of this happens to the fans present, unless the restrictions are removed (and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is open to the possibility), the Bills will host a game of playoffs without warm souls the stadium. This feels a bit wrong, as game day in Buffalo (especially a playoff game in Buffalo) is a special kind of circus. The opponent will be designated, but this will be the first playoff at the home of the Bills since 1996. 1996! Again: the world was different then. I drove a Mercury topaz with a missing front badge and was handed magazines by mail.

I guess Bills fans, left at home, can make a difference, no matter where they look. As has been said, some time has passed, but the most experienced know what to do. The most important games will arrive and the Bills will return. Like, really back. It’s happening. It’s like old times and new times, at the same time.

Write to Jason Gay at [email protected]