Ange Coniglio goes back far enough with the Buffalo Bills to contemplate this weekend’s playoff showdown with Kansas City through the prism of what he sees as the original hurt.
He’s an 87-year-old historian of Buffalo football, especially the American Football League days of the 1960s, which he documents with his “Remember the AFL” website.
Coniglio, a retired civil engineer, reveres the championship Bills of 1964 and 1965 – “The only football teams in Buffalo to ever win their last playoff games,” as he puts it. He holds profound respect for the Bills teams of the 1990s that made it to four consecutive Super Bowls.
Based on all of it, this vision from the beginning, Coniglio offers this perspective on the Kansas City clash:
“I’ll just say it: It’s the biggest football game ever played in Buffalo.”
He was talking not simply about traditional playoff placement but about sweeping digital age impact and context in 2024, about the international spotlight, about the potential ripples for a franchise – whichever way the whole thing goes.
For me, it was a joy to listen as he explained why.
Coniglio, youngest of 10, spent most of his childhood on the West Side. He was 7 in 1944 when his dad, an immigrant from Sicily, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. He remembers how his older siblings helped their mother with the grieving little boy, how it was his sisters who would sometimes accompany him to Bills games at the old War Memorial Stadium.
These weren’t the Bills as we know them now. These were the Bills of the old All-America Football Conference, a rival to the established National Football League. The child loved the team, and was stunned when the NFL – which eventually absorbed a few AAFC teams – picked Cleveland, San Francisco and Baltimore, actively snubbing Buffalo.
“Buffalo fans,” Coniglio said, “held it against the NFL.”
Some – you can hear it in his voice – still do.
It was a bitter repeat…
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