Saturday night, my fiance fired up the computer to listen to the Northeastern – Boston College hockey game online on ESPN890. (ESPN890 doesn’t come in well on the North Shore. Scratch that – ESPN890 doesn’t come in well period.) The ESPN890 website has a convenient-in-theory-but-memory-hogging-in-reality sports-ticker on the bottom of its website at all times. As we were waiting for the audio to load, we were discussing how much we expected Northeastern to win that evening to cheat us BU fans out of a possible Hockey East regular season championship. While talking, I glanced over to the ticker on the webpage.
“T.O. signs with Buffalo,” it read.
“What?!” I yelled, interrupting my fiance’s rant on Northeastern coach Greg Cronin and his hobby of throwing sticks onto the ice when incensed. “T.O. is a Buffalo Bill?!”
My fiance laughed, not looking at the screen. “Stop changing the subject. That would never happen.”
“He signed with Buffalo. Look at the screen.”
In the nearly four years we’ve been dating, I have never seen the guy’s big brown eyes bug out of his head as much as they did when he looked at the screen. “What?!” He immediately opened another tab on the browser and typed in ESPN.com. There it was, the main story: Two days after being cut by the Dallas Cowboys, Terrell Owens had been signed by the most improbable team ever, the Buffalo “We Don’t Spend” Bills. The team who spends less money than me at the last week of every month as I try to make my ridiculous Boston rent.
“It’s not April Fools Day,” he said.
A day I never thought I'd see: T.O. with the Bills
I shook my head. “Did Ralph Wilson pass away? How did this happen?”
We set about reading the article. I quickly glanced through it, read enough to realize that yes, this was true, Owens had actually signed a legitimate contract with the Buffalo Bills, a sense of euphoria came upon me.
I looked at my Patriot fan fiance, who was still reading, who probably hadn’t digested the idea of Owens ever playing in his own conference, let alone for my favorite team no less.
“In your face!” I exclaimed. “You try to beat us with your bum-kneeed Brady now!”
As I did a happy circle dance in my place next to him, which involved me hopping around in a circle to a tune I was making up on the spot that had to do with Edwards passing to Owens, TD, AFC East Champions, Super Bowls, and whatever came to mind, I heard him say, “I have to put up with this all off-season now?”