Buffalo Bills and Long Island: How fans of 'New York's only NFL team' find camaraderie

Back when Tracy Iacovelli of Commack was still teaching physical education and coaching volleyball at North Shore High School, there was a themed spirit event in the building, with everyone asked to wear a T-shirt or jersey of their favorite team. In a sea of fans of the Giants and Jets, Mets and Yankees, Islanders and Rangers, she assumed she would stand out.

“But there were a lot of us walking around wearing Bills gear like I was,” she said. “And we were all like, ‘Wait, I didn’t know you are a Bills fan too.’ ”

Jeff Citron of West Babylon had a similar experience.

He was out walking his dog while wearing his Bills gear, as he almost always does, when a neighbor commented on it.

Citron didn’t think much of it and kept going, but the next time he walked past that house, there was a Bills flag flying in the yard.

“I had no idea he was a fan too,” Citron said.

Surprise!

It turns out there are a lot of them on Long Island. Always have been, even if they haven’t been front and center. Enough to support two official fan groups sanctioned by the team, pack several bars each time the team plays and lure others from the shadows created by the “local” teams . . . even though every Bills fan here will quickly remind you that theirs is the only NFL squad that actually plays in New York.

Those Giants and Jets who play in New Jersey won only eight games between them this season. Meanwhile, the Bills went 13-4, beat the Broncos in a Wild Card game and will host the Ravens in an AFC Divisional game Sunday night. It’s led to Bills fans everywhere — particularly on Long Island, where they so often were made to feel like isolated outsiders — having a rare moment in the sun.

“In the past it always felt like it was wrong to be a Bills fan,” Chelsea Borsack of Oceanside said.

These days, it’s never felt more right.

And whenever they run into each other — in supermarkets or parks or restaurants, or even stopped next to each other at traffic lights — they exchange the two-word code they often call a Buffalo Aloha. Like its Hawaiian counterpart, it can mean everything from “hello” to “goodbye,” from “how are you?” to “I love you.”

This not-so-secret phrase: Go Bills!

“It’s like we are all in a support group,” Randy Stephens of Massapequa Park said. “After all those years of trauma, we see each other and we are like, ‘Good for you! You made it!’ These are the good times.”

Origin stories

So how did Long Island become something of a hotbed for a team that plays its games in the farthest opposite corner of the state, about 400 miles away, farther from here than even the Patriots or Eagles are located?

Some grew up in Western New York and brought their fandom here with them. Russ Rowe is from Marathon, about two hours outside of Buffalo, and moved to Miller Place in late summer 2006 — just before the start of that year’s football season. He and his family closed on their house on a Friday, had a company come to remove about a half-dozen trees on Saturday and had a satellite dish installed on that Monday.

“The first thing we ever did with the house was set it up so I could get the Bills games,” he said. “Priorities.”

Others like Mike Rickard of Levittown went to college upstate — he attended SUNY Cortland in the 1990s — and could not escape the gravitational pull of the team. Back then, if you went to the TV lounge on campus on a Sunday, the Bills were on.

And they were pretty good, too. “I got sucked in,” he said.

Now he and his wife, Mary (who grew up in Buffalo) are season-ticket holders and attend just about every game in Buffalo, driving the seven or so hours there and back for each one. They’ll often go with the Iacovelli family in their blue minivan with the big Bills logo wrapped on the hood.

And then there are folks like Kevin Hamilton of Freeport and Esteban Sanchez of Baldwin. They didn’t have much of an allegiance to any team for most of their lives even while growing up on Long Island. In 2008, a friend invited them to attend a game in Buffalo.

“We immediately found our people,” Hamilton said.

Said Sanchez: “There was no going back.”

Now they typically go to two games a year in person, usually one in Buffalo and another at either MetLife Stadium or another city.

Welcome to the clubs

Many local fans belong to one or both of the two official fan clubs. The Long Island Bills Backers were formed in 2015 by Chris Falzarano, but when he moved off Long Island about four years ago, it was taken over by Mary Rickard and Iacovelli. They have several social media accounts and a Facebook group of more than 700.

These days they meet for every game at Instant Replay, a sports bar in Huntington Station, where the game is shown on a big screen. Last week’s playoff game drew about 120 people to the viewing party.

“There were some games two or three years ago when there were five or six of us in the bar,” Rickard said. “Now we routinely get 40 to 50 people every single week and more for big games. We have people joining all the time saying, ‘Gosh, I didn’t know you guys existed. This is so cool.’ ”

Citron is the president of the newest Long Island chapter, called The 631 Mafia. The entire Buffalo-rooting family is called the Bills Mafia, so this is one little clan. This is their first season in operation and they received official “Bills Backer” status from the team (yes, that’s a real thing) only last Thursday, just in time for the opening playoff game.

They also began online with a Facebook group that is now over 100 and growing.

Their first order of business was to find a bar to watch the games. Citron said there were three qualifications for such a site: A good group of people, good wings and a good vibe.

They eventually settled on Red Zone Bar & Grill in West Babylon (which already was a two-time winner for best Buffalo wings on Long Island, by the way). They had a group of about 50 fans on hand Sunday.

Borsack, who joined The 631 Mafia, said after years watching the Bills on a small corner screen at some other bar or restaurant, getting shouted down by Giants and Jets fans, and experiencing the awkwardness of cheering in an otherwise quiet room when her team did something well, she likes being able to watch games with other Bills fans.

“It’s the closest vibe to Orchard Park on Long Island,” she said of the Red Zone. “You walk into a room filled with strangers and suddenly everyone is your friend.”

Bills fans do have a reputation for being, um, intense. There are rowdy pregame rituals that include smashing through folding tables, doing shots from the finger holes of bowling balls and covering oneself with condiments such as ketchup and mustard.

GO BILLS pic.twitter.com/EpHXy5MM1C

— Mark (@marKUSguetta) January 15, 2024

“We’ve never lost a tailgate,” Citron said.

These Long Island gatherings, though, tend to be more subtle and family-friendly — with the occasional nod to the antics of the lunatic fringe. A few years ago, a couple brought their baby to Instant Replay for a “Bills Christening” in which they (safely!) lowered the child through a small paper table during a game.

John Agostino, who owns Red Zone, said he has been on the lookout for some cheap used tables to conduct full-sized but similar ceremonies at his place. The new ones he found are too solidly built, he said.

“If you jumped on it, you’d break your back, not the table,” he said. “No one wants that.”

Past scars, present hope

These are the kinds of finishing touches that have to take place at Red Zone as it embraces its place in the Bills community. It used to be a place for Steelers fans to gather, but that crowd fizzled out, and so the Bills have claimed it. Earlier this week, Citron was sitting at the bar looking around at the team banners hung on the walls.

“We need to get a neon sign,” Citron said of adding to the Bills decor. “It’s only been four days!” Agostino replied with a reminder of just how recently The 631 Mafia became official, and how new this venture actually is.

It’s not all wings and blue cheese for these people.

There are perils to being a Bills fan, scars from the past. In the 1990s, the team went to four straight Super Bowls and lost all four, the first one on a last-second missed field goal against the Giants.

Then there was a 17-year playoff drought. To put that in perspective, the Jets have the longest current streak without making the postseason in North American major pro sports, and theirs is only at 14 years.

In between, there have been calamities such as the Music City Miracle, when the Titans returned a kickoff for a playoff game-winning touchdown against them in 2000, the epic divisional-round game against Kansas City in 2022 in which Buffalo took a 36-33 lead with 13 seconds remaining in regulation but never got the ball back and lost in overtime, and last year’s playoff exit against Kansas City, this time on a missed 48-yard field goal that, just like the one against the Giants in 1991, sailed wide right.

“Sometimes I think I’ll be OK if we lost, let’s just not make it so dramatic,” Rowe said.

It’s why any Bills fan is loath to gloat this winter or expect an easy path to the Super Bowl. Most are exceedingly wary of the Ravens, and if they even allow themselves to look ahead, nervous about the prospect of facing Kansas City again.

Yet there also is an underlying hope. Quarterback Josh Allen has had his best season as a pro and is a contender for the league’s MVP award. The Bills added receiver Amari Cooper via trade during the season. Linebacker Matt Milano has returned from back-to-back long-term injuries and has been playing well of late.

“It feels different this year,” Kevin Toomey of Lindenhurst said cautiously.

There is even quiet talk in the corners about what might happen if the Bills keep winning.

Rowe said getting back to the Super Bowl would elicit flashbacks.

“Unfortunately, there will be a lot of things brought back up with the past Super Bowl mishaps,” he said. “It’ll be more stressful than another team’s fans would understand because you just don’t want to lose another one . . . It’s a little added weight on our shoulders. Of course, I’d still like to experience it.”

Some Long Island fans such as Iacovelli and her husband, Vinny, say they will try to get to New Orleans for the Super Bowl if the Bills are in it.

“What an expense,” she said, calculating the tickets, hotels and airfare in her head. “It could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, though. If we can swing it, I wouldn’t want to give that up.”

Others are looking at more practical avenues such as traveling to Buffalo to watch the game there, perhaps even at Highmark Stadium if there is a viewing event, and then possibly staying for, dare to dream, a parade a few days later.

Most, though, will be staying close to home and watching the game just as they have many of the regular-season ones of late: Surrounded by fellow Bills fans who have become more visible, who have forged their own small but growing communities here, and who will appreciate the significance of the moment.

If the Bills do win it all, no one is sure what will take place because it’s never happened before.

But there are bound to be massive celebrations mixed with expressions of relief up in Buffalo, all throughout Western New York, in all those little upstate college towns, up and down the Hudson River Valley . . . and, yes, on Long Island.

Why wouldn’t there be?

“In my mind, we are New York’s team,” Citron said of his Bills. “We are Long Island’s team.”

It’s getting to be harder and harder to argue against that.