It’s the long walk out of the stadium that gets you. You’ve watched your beloved team beaten on its own field, and all you can hear is silence and the shuffle of feet. Surrounded by fellow fans, some wearing jerseys, others face paint, still others full-body costumes, you’re united in grief, with the hollow, yawning awareness that it’s over, it’s really over just starting to take hold.

Buffalo Bills fans have had many of these walks — so many, too many — the most recent coming Sunday night at the hands of, yet again, the Kansas City Chiefs. Patrick Mahomes stomped on Bills fans’ hearts once again, marking the third time in the past four years that Mahomes has walked off the field in triumph.

No franchise’s fans deserve the kind of relentless skull-dragging the Bills have endured over the team’s history. It’s not fair. It’s not right. But it’s football.

Hell, Bills fans have suffered so much pain that the Football Gods are rebooting old plotlines now. With a chance to tie the game Sunday, a Buffalo field-goal attempt drifted awry. As CBS’s Jim Nantz perfectly, painfully captured it in the moment: “Wide right. The two most dreaded words in Buffalo have surfaced again.”

Yes, Nantz was referencing the origin story of Buffalo pain, the would-be Super Bowl-winning field goal miss by Scott Norwood way back in 1991. Buffalo would get to three more Super Bowls after that — four in a row, still a record — but would never again get that close to victory. Now, after a couple of decades of wandering in Belichick-enforced wilderness, the Bills have returned to the postseason … only to find Mahomes ready to fire footballs directly at their skulls every January.

Look, put aside the fact that even if the Bills had made the field goal, it likely would’ve only delayed the inevitable. The game would have been tied, and Mahomes would have had 1:43 to get into field-goal range. We all know exactly how that would’ve ended. The Bills had their chances to win and flat-out missed them, yes. But at this point, lecturing them for that feels a little like telling someone who has just climbed out of a wrecked car that their vehicle’s pretty dirty and could use a wash.

The larger looming tragedy of all this is that the 12-lane highway of opportunity that once lay wide open before Buffalo has pinched down to, at best, a narrow alley and, at worst, a keyhole. Josh Allen’s cap hit, for instance, was $10.2 million in 2021, $16.3 million in 2022 and $18.6 million in 2023. Next year, it leaps to $47 million, and it doesn’t drop below $41 million for the remaining five years on his contract. That means Buffalo is hereafter spending an additional $30 million to keep the same quarterback — a hell of a quarterback, true, but still the exact same dude — in uniform.

Through it all, Bills fans will persevere. You know the Bills Mafia by its most cinematically extreme members, the loons who leap through tables or light themselves on fire, often both at once: