When Krystal Burse awoke one day last week, her Bills Mafia family had filled her Twitter feed with glad tidings: Canadians can soon cross the Peace Bridge again.
This was welcome news at her home in St. Catharines, Ont. Her father, Greg Burse, is a Bills fanatic from way back. She grew up on the Bills. And now so does her son, Quinton, 9.
“I love the Bills because my father does,” Krystal says. “And now my son, he doesn’t know any different.”
Land crossings for Canadians will open Nov. 8. “Not on time for the Dolphins game on Halloween,” she says. “But we’ll take what we can get.”
Most Bills fans who live in Canada have not been to a home game since the 2019 season. But Greg, who turns 65 this month, and Krystal, 38, made it to this season’s opener at Highmark Stadium. How they did that is a measure of their devotion.
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Air travel was open to Canadians, so they drove to Toronto, flew to Detroit, and then flew to Pittsburgh. There they rented a car for the drive to Buffalo, where they stayed overnight so they could arrive by 7 a.m. at Hammer’s Lot, where they reunited with longtime tailgating pals. Cost for roundtrip airfare, rental car, hotel and tickets: Roughly $4,000 Canadian. (Plus $160 each in U.S. dollars for Covid testing for their return to Canada.)
“Oh, it was worth it,” Krystal says. “Absolutely it was.”
They had looked into flying into Buffalo, but she says that would have required flights from Toronto to Florida to Washington to Buffalo. “That was a lot of backtracking,” she says. “And a lot more cost.”
Her father grew up on the Bills of Jack Kemp and Elbert Dubenion, who won their first AFL championship in 1964, the same year that the Cleveland Browns won the NFL title.
“My brother was a big Browns fan, but I could never,” Greg says. “The Bills are so close to us, eh?”
Well, sure, but so are the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
“I’ve never been to a CFL game in my life,” Greg says. “We are an NFL family.”
Family is the key word here. Del Reid, a co-founder of Bills Mafia, says the tongue-in-cheek name is meant to invoke the concept of family.
“I met Bills fans on Twitter who are now my real-life friends,” Krystal says. “We refer to each other as the Bills Mafia family, and it is for real. When I woke up this morning, I had been tagged on my Twitter timeline by my Bills Mafia family, telling me it is time to come back across the border. That’s how I found out. That’s my family. One of them said, ‘You’re coming home soon.’
“I have some blood relatives I never talk to. And I have friends in Bills Mafia who I talk to every day.”
She met one such pal on Twitter and then met her in person for the first time at the opener in September. Next month, that friend will join Krystal and her immediate family – her father, her mother and her son – in New Orleans for the Bills game on Thanksgiving night.
“When the schedule dropped,” Krystal says, “we bought tickets for New Orleans right away.”
They did Canadian Thanksgiving last week. They’ll do American Thanksgiving in New Orleans. They will fly there, which is different from a road trip they took to Jacksonville in January 2018 to see the Bills’ playoff game following the 17-season drought. That time they drove nearly 1,100 miles to see what turned out to be a 10-3 loss to the Jaguars.
“When we got there, people said, ‘Are you guys crazy?’ ” Greg says. “And we said, ‘No, we’re Bills fans.’ ”
Temperatures in Jacksonville hovered near the freezing mark on the day before the game. Floridians are not used to that sort of thing.
“We had on long-sleeved shirts and Bills jerseys,” Greg says. “People there were wearing hoodies and scarves. They looked at us and they said, ‘You must be from Buffalo.’ And we said, ‘No, we’re from Canada.’ ”
Which is, in some ways, the same thing. That’s how it is on the Niagara Frontier: We share a region, a river, a liking for cold – and a football team.
Let the border open fully, at long last. And let Bills Mafia be one big happy cross-border family again.
