Splitting Bills With Toronto Key to Revitalized Buffalo

The Bills’ loss in the 1967 AFL championship game began the downfall of the football team and the city of Buffalo itself, native Gregg Easterbrook writes in the Atlantic, and he suggests looking north to turn everything around. Adding affluent Toronto (100 miles away) as a second “home” city would inject dollars into the franchise and even “change Buffalo’s image from backward-focused to wave-of-the-future.”

The Bills have agreed to play five games in Toronto over the next half-decade, raising Easterbrook’s hopes of urban, and sporting, renewal. “So long as the Bills keep a foot in the city, they keep alive the dream of a Super Bowl win—a hope that an infusion of Loonies (Canadian dollars) might sustain,” he writes. “And should the Bills win the Super Bowl, Buffalo will return to national prominence. I don’t just think this will happen, I know it will.” (More football stories.)