Hank Stram, coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, raises his arm in jubilant victory as he is carried off the field on the shoulders of his players after the Chiefs whipped the Buffalo Bills, 31-7, for the AFL championship in Buffalo on Jan. 1, 1967, at War Memorial Stadium. 

 Bill Achatz/Associated Press

Alyssa O'Reilly, who watched last year's American Football Conference Championship Game from the nosebleed seats in the Kansas City Chiefs' stadium, said the Buffalo Bills' loss left her weeping the whole way home.

George Zornick has a happier memory from attending the Bills-Chiefs AFC title game in Orchard Park in 1994, when he was 10 and just assumed every football season ended with Buffalo playing in the Super Bowl.

But Ed Rutkowski remembers the pain of losing to Kansas City on Jan. 1, 1967, when the Chiefs blocked Rutkowski and his Bills teammates from playing in the first "AFL-NFL World Championship Game."

"It made me sick," Rutkowski said in an interview this week, clearly recalling key moments from the game 55 years later. "It made me so upset."

The Miami Dolphins and, especially, the New England Patriots are more familiar nemeses for the Bills and their fans. But the Chiefs and Bills have had a low-key rivalry since their days in the American Football League in the 1960s – a competition that has heated up over the past two years.

They have rosters stuffed with talent on both sides of the ball and feature two of the most dynamic young quarterbacks in the league, Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes.

They have devoted fan bases who fill their home stadiums, travel to road games and aren't afraid to mix it up on social media. (More on that Twitter sweet potato spat later.)

And they are meeting in the playoffs for the fifth time in Sunday's AFC divisional round game at Arrowhead Stadium – the most the Bills have played any opponent in the postseason.

"You're going to see a lot of blue in the stadium," said Jimmy Gaffney, a leader of the Bills Backers group in Kansas City, who compared the burgeoning Allen-Mahomes rivalry to the dramatic Tom Brady-Peyton Manning clashes of a decade ago.

Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen hugs Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes following their matchup on Jan. 24, 2021. 

Fans from Western New York and throughout the country are venturing to Sunday's game to see whether the Bills can exact revenge against the team that dumped them from the playoffs last year.

They will be welcomed by the hardy group of Bills fans who have banded together in Chiefs territory and who share the hope the weekend ends with Buffalo vanquishing its crimson-clad antagonists.

"Regardless of what happens Sunday, it feels like a beginning and not the end of the chapter," said Zornick, a North Buffalo native and University at Buffalo graduate who had Bills season tickets even after moving to Washington, D.C.

Unlike the Dolphins and Patriots, the Chiefs are not in the Bills' division. But Sunday will mark the fourth time the teams have played over the past two seasons: twice in the regular season and twice in the playoffs.

In this case, at least if you listened to player interviews this week, familiarity between the teams has bred respect.

Evan Davis, 36, said he hears the same thing from Chiefs fans in Kansas City, where he has lived since 2011. The South Dakota native, who defied his family to unexpectedly pick the early 1990s Buffalo Bills as his favorite team, said Buffalo and Kansas City fans endured long stretches of futility earlier in this century.

They were both "lovable losers," Davis said, and the teams' respective returns to gridiron glory – including a Super Bowl title for the Chiefs – inspired mutual esteem.

Davis dresses his 3½-year-old daughter and 18-month-old son in Bills blue on days when everyone else in the nursery is wearing Chiefs red. "They're both known in day care as the Bills fans," Davis said.

Davis recruited his wife, Jennifer, to the cause as well, and she returned the favor by registering their neighborhood tavern, the Brooksider Sports Bar, as an official Bills Backers site.

"And surprised me on Christmas with it," Evan Davis said. "We're a small group, but we're a mighty group."

There are other, larger Bills Backers clubs in the Kansas City area, including the group based at the Fox and Hound in Overland Park, Kan.

Gaffney said the group has about 70 members, including 20 or so who regularly gather to watch each week's game.

The Long Island native, 45, said that even during the Bills' drought years, he had a ready retort to Chiefs fans who had last celebrated a Super Bowl win in January 1970: "At least I was alive to see my team in the Super Bowl."

But the Chiefs' recent run of success, including a Super Bowl victory in February 2020, is "agonizing" for Bills fans, Gaffney said.

Last year's loss to the Chiefs, just one win away from the Super Bowl, was a low point, he said.

"It was tough. We all felt like Stefon Diggs," said Gaffney, referring to the moment after the AFC Championship Game, captured by Buffalo News photographer James P. McCoy, when the Bills' wide receiver stood with his hands on his hips glumly watching the Chiefs' on-field celebration.

Gaffney's Bills Backers of Kansas City group has fielded numerous questions on its Facebook page from Bills fans traveling in for Sunday's divisional round game.

One fan who doesn't need help getting around is O'Reilly, 34, who was in Kansas City last January and is back for round two.

Just this season, the road warrior, who grew up in the Town of Tonawanda but lives in Dallas now, has traveled to Tennessee, New Orleans, Tampa and Buffalo for last week's playoff game against the Patriots and is now taking the not-quite-eight-hour drive to Kansas City.

She has fourth-row seats behind the Bills bench and plans to hold up a sign reading, "Unfinished Business."

"You still feel like you have something to prove," said O'Reilly, who bought two extra tickets that she gave away through Twitter late Thursday.

Tickets were still available, at reasonable prices, for Sunday's game at Arrowhead. TickPick, the ticket resale marketplace, reported Thursday that the average purchase price was $255 and the "get-in" price was $134, making it the most affordable divisional-round playoff game of the weekend.

Ticket prices may be low but the stakes are high. How high? Buffalo and Kansas City fans were squabbling on Twitter over a Bills fan's tongue-in-cheek campaign to persuade some of his compatriots to bring good-luck sweet potatoes into Arrowhead for the game.

Back in the 1990s, the Bills were so good they didn't need lucky tubers to win playoff games.

Zornick went to the Jan. 23, 1994, conference championship game, where the Bills pounded the Chiefs and, as he put it, "the ghost of Joe Montana," 30-13. He recalled the attitude of the team, and its backers, as wanting to make the Super Bowl for a fourth-straight year to annoy other fans, national media and league officials.

The Chiefs' rivalry with the Bills, however, began with Buffalo's loss to the Chiefs following the 1966 season, at home in War Memorial Stadium, just one win away from playing in what later became known as the first Super Bowl.

It was hard to watch the Chiefs lose to the Green Bay Packers two weeks later, said Rutkowski, who was convinced Buffalo's talented cornerbacks Booker Edgerson and Butch Byrd never would have allowed Packers wide receiver Max McGee to run wild in that game. ("They were on wide receivers like flies on garbage," Rutkowski said.)

How long has the sting of that loss lingered? Rutkowski has an N95 face mask, produced by Drs. Todd and Sam Shatkin at their Aesthetic Associates Centre in Amherst prior to last year's Bills-Chiefs playoff tilt.

It reads "Avenge '66."

One year later, the sentiment still holds true.

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