Buffalo!

There was a mass shooting in a downtown supermarket midway through last year.

A number of black Americans gunned down as they walked through the produce section.

Buffalo had to dig deep to band together enough to get through it.

In the last couple of months there have been crippling and deadly snowstorms and blizzards.

Just horrendous, damaging, soul-sucking storms that robbed us of Christmas in a lot of cases.

And then, the Bills, on a 6-game winning streak, and with the entire county cheering their every movement, took the field on Monday night.

And 8 minutes in, their young safety laid on the field, fighting for his life.

I’m not sure I’ll ever forget what it felt like at that moment.

As the Bills players wept on the sidelines, Kathy asked a question that just hung in the air.

“Did he die?”

Time was really moving slowly.

I wasn’t sure that the NFL was going to cancel the game, but I was all done.

I went to bed.

Slept the sleep of a teething baby.

I kept rolling over and grabbing the phone.

There weren’t any new headlines and each time I thought:

“No news is good news.”

And the sun came up.

It always does.

I walked around the jobs and it dawned on me that it was really quiet.

We didn’t talk much about it, but what happened during the game was almost too much to bear.

Funny thing was that no one was even discussing the super bowl chances of a team that has such high expectations.

“I just hope that kid is all right,” a drywall crew leader said. “Or this city is going to be sad for a long time.”

Buffalo.

We need a break.