Culture
Chiefs move on to sixth straight AFC title game after beating Bills
By Larry Holder, Nate Taylor and Joe Buscaglia
The Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills added another playoff classic to their rivalry Sunday. But again, the Chiefs came out on top with a 27-24 win over the Bills at Highmark Stadium.
The Chiefs will travel to Baltimore to face the Ravens in the AFC Championship next Sunday at M&T Stadium. Kansas City will play in its sixth consecutive AFC Championship Game.
The Bills, meanwhile, are sent home by the Chiefs for the third time in four years. Kansas City beat Buffalo in the conference championship in the 2020 playoffs, divisional round in the 2021 playoffs and again in the divisional round Sunday.
“It sucks,” Josh Allen said postgame. “Losing sucks. Losing to them, losing to anybody, at home, sucks.”
Bills kicker Tyler Bass missed a 44-yard field goal wide right with 1:43 remaining in the game that would’ve tied it.
The Chiefs’ Isiah Pacheco picked up the game-winning score as he broke through for a 5-yard touchdown run less than a minute into the fourth quarter to go up 27-24.
But a series of wild turns in the fourth quarter hindered both teams after the Pacheco touchdown. It started by Buffalo failing to pick up a first down on a fake punt attempt in its own territory. Kansas City only deployed 10 players for the punt return and still stopped the Bills’ Damar Hamlin short of the first down on the fake punt attempt. The Chiefs took the ball over on downs at the Bills’ 32-yard line.
“The defense, they turned it on in that fourth quarter. That is a great offense, that’s a great football player in Josh Allen and a great team and they were going up and down the field and the defense said enough is enough and they got the stops,” Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes said.
Two plays later, the Chiefs’ Mecole Hardman caught a pass from Mahomes and fumbled the ball as he was tackled near the goal line. Originally officials ruled Hardman down. Buffalo challenged the call successfully, as officials ruled the ball went out of the end zone for a touchback giving possession to the Bills.
The Bills seemed to put themselves in position to at least tie the game, but the Bass miss ended the Bills’ season.
Allen’s two first-half rushing touchdowns propelled the Bills to a 17-13 halftime lead. The first came on a 5-yard run early in the second quarter. The second helped Buffalo regain the lead at 17-13 on a 2-yard TD scamper near the close of the first half.
The Chiefs took a 13-10 lead when Mahomes connected with a wide-open Travis Kelce on a 22-yard touchdown reception with 3:33 left in the second quarter. Kelce blew a kiss and formed his hands into a heart in the direction of the suite where pop star Taylor Swift, Kelce’s girlfriend, watched the game in the stadium. Shortly after, Eagles center Jason Kelce, Travis’ brother, came to the front of the open-air suite shirtless to bellow his satisfaction for his brother’s touchdown.
Kansas City’s defense stepped up
With the Chiefs’ season on the line, defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo relied on his best personnel, his dime package. With three safeties on the field — Justin Reid, Deon Bush and rookie Chamarri Conner — the Chiefs’ defense was able to prevent the Bills from entering the end zone on their final drive of the game. Chris Jones, the Chiefs’ best pass rusher, was exceptional, too. He created enough pressure to impact Allen’s final two pass attempts, both of which fell incomplete.
Even more impressive, the Chiefs didn’t give up the big pass to Allen despite safety Mike Edwards sustaining a concussion on just the second play of the game when he broke up a pass in the middle of the field. The Chiefs’ stop just outside the red zone in the closing minutes forced the Bills to take a potential game-tying field goal. When Bills kicker Bass missed his 44-yard attempt wide right, several of the Chiefs’ defenders celebrated by leaping into the air and in each other’s arms.
Similar to their season, the Chiefs’ offensive players should thank their defensive teammates. Midway through the fourth quarter, the Chiefs’ offense has two chances to score with a 27-24 lead. Their golden opportunity arrived when the Bills failed on a fake punt play deep in their own territory. But two plays later, on a pop-pass jet sweep, Hardman fumbled the ball near the pylon, the ball rolling into the end zone and out of bounds for a turnover. — Nate Taylor, Chiefs beat writer
The Bills’ playoff curse continues
For the third time in four postseasons, the Bills have had their Super Bowl dreams dashed by the Chiefs. Even with different terms this time around, having the chance to play the Chiefs at home in the playoffs for the first time since Sean McDermott became head coach, the Bills still couldn’t get over the hump. They were met with a near-perfect game by Mahomes, who delivered a statement win in his first-ever road playoff game. Now the Bills are left with yet another premature playoff exit and nothing but offseason questions with an aging roster and a big cap sheet that likely needs plenty of trimming.
The Bills had no answers in the middle of the field for the Chiefs, as Mahomes, Kelce and Pacheco were gaining chunk plays at will. The Chiefs clearly had a plan to attack linebackers A.J. Klein and Tyrel Dodson through the air, and it worked consistently. Kelce was open seemingly all game, and once that was established, Pacheco came through with clutch runs throughout the second half. Outside of a late forced punt, and a Hardman fumble, it was a perfect game from Mahomes, who continues to be a thorn in the Bills’ side when it isn’t the regular season. — Joe Buscaglia, Bills beat writer
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Required reading
(Photo: Timothy T Ludwig / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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