Bison

Orchard Park sits on the edge of Buffalo, close enough to the lake that winter games arrive with lake-effect snow already falling. Highmark Stadium holds 71,608, and for a region that measures itself against harder winters than most, the Bills are the one thing the whole city checks in on together.

The franchise started life as a charter member of the American Football League, taking its name from William "Buffalo Bill" Cody rather than from any local herd. It joined the NFL in 1970 once the AFL folded into it. Two AFL Championships, in 1964 and 1965, came before that move, won under circumstances the record books remember better than most fans now can.

What the Bills are known for, though, is what came after: four straight AFC Championships from 1990 to 1993, and four straight Super Bowl defeats in the same stretch — a run of near-misses no other franchise has matched. That stretch, more than the earlier titles, shaped how the club is talked about: a team that got to the biggest game and could not close it out, four times running.

The rivalry that matters most sits inside the AFC East, against the New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins. Decades of divisional meetings against Patriots have carried the weight of the conference on the line more than once, and the history between them adds an edge that a simple division standing doesn't explain.