CANCUN, Mexico – The Buffalo Bills and the New England Patriots play tonight at Highmark Stadium.
Might be chilly.
Where else would you rather be? Well, how about here on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula?
Temperatures at the stadium tonight are expected to be in the 20s. Here they are expected to be, oh, nicely into the 70s.
That’s fine by Troy Dunn. He is a Bills season-ticket holder who bought a vacation package for Mexico before the Bills’ schedule came out.
When he saw that he would miss the Patriots game, he was disturbed at first. Now he’s happy that he and his pal Ryan Pope will be watching in the warmth.
“I hope it’s really cold in Buffalo and Mac Jones freezes into an ice cube,” Dunn says of the Patriots' rookie quarterback. Meanwhile he’ll be sipping umbrella drinks with ice cubes in them.
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Dunn, 29, is a nurse at the Erie County Medical Center. Pope, 27, is a painting contractor in Buffalo. They wore Bills beach hats as they emerged from the airport in Cancun, offering calls of “Go Bills” to one and all.
Bills fans are everywhere, of course, and that includes here on the Yucatán. Scott Geise is here to celebrate his 60th birthday and his son Stone’s 25th.
“We’re staying at an all-inclusive resort and we’ve got a big room, like a presidential suite, and we’re going to have 12 of us in here watching the game,” Geise says. “The dirty dozen.”
One of the dozen is Steve Geise, Scott’s brother. Steve is retired from a career at the Pentagon, where everyone knew he was a Bills fan. He wears a charging buffalo on his cap and his heart on his sleeve.
“No one ever gave me a hard time,” Steve says. “Seems like everyone who works at the Pentagon is originally from somewhere else, and we all rooted for different teams.”
Scott Geise is a dentist. He and his brother grew up in Newfane, where Scott played junior varsity basketball at Newfane High School for a rookie coach by the name of John Beilein, who would go on to other gigs in the coaching biz.
Beilein was recently enshrined in the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame. Scott is a member of the Hobart and William Smith College Sports Hall of Fame. He is in for lacrosse – and for football.
Or, as they call it in Mexico, futbol Americano.
The NFL is popular in Mexico, where the most popular teams are the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers. But a survey taken in 2015 found that the Bills are the seventh-most popular, which is impressive given Buffalo’s small-market size and the Bills’ record for most of this millennium.
The Mexican football website “Pimero y Diez” figured that nearly 4% of the nation’s reported 28 million NFL fans root for the Bills. Most of these are in their upper 30s or early 40s, having come of age in the Jim Kelly era, when the Bills were Super Bowl regulars.
Can these Bills get back to the Super Bowl? Tonight’s game will go a long way in telling us if such a thing is possible.
Dunn and Pope plan to watch it from a bar somewhere on the Yucatán Peninsula. They’ll root hard for their Bills to beat the hated Patriots.
Think of these intrepid travelers as Bills Mafia, Cancun Bureau. But, guys, you are guests here. If the Bills win, please, no jumping through tables.
Dunn thinks about that admonition for a long moment.
“No promises,” he says.
