There are a lot of us who remember where we were on the evening of Jan. 23, and that includes Von Miller. He just so happened to be on a cross-country flight from Tampa back to Los Angeles, after he and the Rams scored a thrilling 30–27 win over the defending champion Buccaneers to advance to the NFC title game.
Like everyone else, he was following a game that would, somehow, top the one he had just finished.
“I saw the beginning of it,” Miller said, from a raucous visitors’ locker room at Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday night. “It looked like they had won. And when we landed, they’d lost.”
The feed for Bills-Chiefs, Miller explained to me, cut out on the plane, and so he missed the sequence of nonstop haymakers Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes threw at each other at the end of the AFC divisional playoff game. He didn’t see Allen’s apparent dagger touchdown throw to Gabriel Davis, Kansas City’s 13-second answer, and then Mahomes and his offense slicing through a gassed Buffalo defense to notch the knockout blow in overtime.
Upon landing at LAX, Miller got the final score. Little did he know, at the time, that he’d have the weight of avenging it on his shoulders nine months later.
Though that’s really not how Miller saw Sunday at all; in his view, that epic loss was never his cross to bear.
“I wasn’t here, man. Ignorance is bliss,” he says, laughing. “I can only tell you about what we were doing this week. We came into this game, we had peace and we took it at one play at a time. We knew it was gonna be a 60-minute fight—if not a 70-minute fight—and we just prepared for whatever.”
‘Whatever,’ in this case, was a game that had every bit the feel of the heavyweight title fight last January’s game was, with every snap feeling meaningful for everyone watching. ‘Whatever,’ on Sunday, was the two young quarterbacks again showing why the football-watching world spent the last nine months talking about their winter gunfight and what the encore might hold. Most of all, though, ‘whatever’ was this one ending in a different way.
And it was more than just a different result that the Bills got, a 24–20 win over the Chiefs at Arrowhead. It was also how this one ended—with, of all things, a defensive stand fueled by a guy brought to Buffalo to make sure history didn’t repeat itself.
When the Bills needed a stop, down three with fewer than seven minutes left in the game, Miller gave them a sack of Patrick Mahomes. When the Bills needed to close Kansas City out, it was Miller flushing Mahomes from the pocket and forcing a rushed throw that was picked off by fifth-year corner Taron Johnson. When the offense needed the defense, this time—unlike last year—the defense answered the bell. Which is why Miller is where he is now in the first place.
He’s here to be the final piece for a champion, as he was in L.A. last year. And while no trophies were raised last night, the most hyped game of the regular season brought on a vivid illustration of how he fits into the complicated puzzle of bringing a title to Buffalo.
