While devastating defeats are always heartbreaking in the moment, the years that immediately follow truly determine how much a loss stings.
I’ve noted on here before that perhaps the biggest part of what makes sports fandom a cultural staying power is the shared misery it offers to large groups of people who experienced their favorite team take a crushing loss together.
While a look back on devastating losses that sting for generations may fall on deaf ears for fans of the New England Patriots or Los Angeles Lakers, fans of most other teams have been there in the past quarter-century or so – sustaining an unbelievably tough defeat, coming closer than ever before to an elusive championship.
It’s hard to find a place where that feeling is more apparent than in Canada’s largest city, with Toronto Blue Jays fans watching their team come within mere inches of a World Series victory, only for the Hollywood villain Los Angeles Dodgers to come back and win their second Fall Classic in a row.
It’s hard to imagine pain as a sports fan getting any worse than what Blue Jays fans felt on the evening of Nov. 1, but the jury is still out on just how devastating of a loss that will go down as.
There is perhaps no better example of this than the 2014 and 2015 Kansas City Royals teams. After not making the postseason for 29 years after their 1985 World Series championship, the Royals stormed back into the playoffs in 2014 as baseball’s Cinderella team, coming within 90 feet of forcing Game 7 of the World Series into extra innings.
Yet Giants playoff ace Madison Bumgarner shut the door on the Royals, who many fans believed were a one-off surprise team that fell short in their one major opportunity revolving around the club’s core of players in Alex Gordon, Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas.
Appearing unfazed by the devastating loss in front of their home fans, the Royals were the AL Central’s best team wire-to-wire in 2015, making two major acquisitions near the trade deadline to bolster the club in spots where they were deficient a year prior – adding ace pitcher Johnny Cueto to their rotation while trading for superutility player Ben Zobrist.
The two acquisitions proved to make a world of difference for the Royals, who outlasted the Houston Astros in five games in that year’s ALDS before dispatching the Blue Jays in the ALCS in six games. Kansas City went on to handily win the World Series, provoking defensive meltdowns behind stellar pitching as the Royals took down the New York Mets in five games.
With the Royals’ victory of the 2015 World Series, the 2014 Fall Classic is now solely remembered by fans as being the Madison Bumgarner show, with the lefty ace dominating Kansas City throughout the series as part of an incredible postseason.
Yet if the Royals didn’t make their way back to the World Series and win it all in 2015, the prior year would also be remembered by Kansas City fans as an incredible opportunity that was squandered, coming up just short of being baseball’s royalty when not even the most diehard of fans would have expected it. The series would have been equally remembered as the Royals blowing their one big shot in 30 years.
One doesn’t have to look too deep into hypotheticals to imagine how a devastating loss like that can only grow more painful in the years to follow.
Professional sports offers no better example than the Buffalo Bills of the early 1990’s, who won the AFC in four consecutive seasons before losing in the Super Bowl all four times. This is a level of pain truly unparalleled, as it shows a team making it all the way back to the championship, the toughest thing to do after a grueling regular season, all to encounter the same mental barrier that was there for their first trip to the Super Bowl.
The AFC title run ended in Buffalo without a Lombardi Trophy as it kicked off a roughly 25-year period of futility at worst, mediocrity at best for the Bills as the Super Bowl defeats became more agonizing each season.
Though the Bills haven’t made it back to the Super Bowl since that run, some Buffalo fans may be feeling an even worse case of deja vu. Buffalo has made the playoffs in each of the past six seasons, as well as in seven of the last eight campaigns – and has only made it as far as the AFC Championship Game twice.
Buffalo has clearly been met with a playoff kryptonite in the form of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, who have defeated the Bills in the playoffs four times in this decade alone, including both AFC title games that the Bills have appeared in.
The Bills also may be approaching the twilight of this era – holding an 8-4 record and AFC Wild Card spot heading into Week 14 action, trailing the New England Patriots by three games in the AFC East.
The 2025 season could present one of the last opportunities for the Bills to brush aside their recent and older playoff defeats aside as they still aim for their first-ever Super Bowl championship. Another loss would only further solidify the pain already felt by Buffalo fans, who are met with no reprieve from the perennially awful Sabres in the NHL.
The Bills are far from the only franchise with fans that have had their wounds from tough playoff losses cut deeper each year as disappointments continue to pile on.
Sacramento Kings fans still ask themselves “what if?” regarding the 2002 Western Conference Finals, with the Lakers riding extremely friendly officiating to their third straight NBA Finals while the Kings haven’t been anywhere near since.
Minnesota Vikings fans are still left reeling from the pain of the 1998 NFC Championship Game, with a missed field goal from the previously perfect Gary Anderson still standing alone as the most devastating turning point in franchise history. With a 4-8 record and a last-place standing in the NFC North, it doesn’t look like 2025 will be the year for Minnesota.
Franchises also can’t let themselves get trapped in the myth of there being a seemingly endless championship window open – take it from this Chicago Cubs fan, who would still be left without a championship for 117 years if it weren’t for a young core winning it all in what appeared to be their first real crack at winning a World Series – when it turned out to be their only real chance.
The Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics of the early 2000’s both tried to keep a competitive core alive for several years, yet by their third and fourth tries with the same group, their best opportunities were already behind them.
While my criticism for the Cubs’ front office knows no bounds, there’s no question that the Cubs would remain ringless today if it weren’t for the trade deadline acquisition of Aroldis Chapman. Had the Cubs been complacent as they are today, relying on future opportunities with the same group of players, they simply would have never won the World Series.
We may be watching this dynamic play out in real-time with the Detroit Lions, who were a half of decent football away from their first-ever Super Bowl in the 2023 NFC Championship Game before squandering a 17-point halftime lead to the San Francisco 49ers.
Though it looked like that was only the first of several big opportunities for the Lions, that dynamic has greatly changed in two short years. A historic 15-2 season in 2024 was extinguished by the upstart Washington Commanders in the NFC Divisional Round, while this year’s Lions are currently 8-5 while sitting outside the NFC playoff picture.
Although all it takes is getting into the playoffs and getting hot for a month to win it all, another year without a title in Detroit will make their blown lead in the 2023 NFC title game stand out in a fashion similar to Minnesota’s loss in 1998 – a comparison that will become ironclad if the Lions move on from the Jared Goff era without a Super Bowl.
The heartbreak from being in the moment of a devastating loss will never go away for fans, but it all feels worth it if they eventually triumph – even if it took 108 years. But in a sports world of no guarantees, the best thing teams can do to avenge a heartbreaking loss is to pull out all the stops to make it back the very next year.
For the countless teams that don’t, what initially seemed to be part of the climb ends up becoming the peak several years later.
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