[LINK] "Will we still love the Bills in Toronto?"

[rfmcdonald]

As people have been speculating for at least the past few months--I touched briefly on the subject last October and last November--earlier this month the Buffalo Bills have announced plans to actually play eight games in Toronto over the next several years. This is far from being confirmation of a full-scale relocation of the team, but it is enough to make many people like Donn Esmonds in the Buffalo News start to wonder what the people of Buffalo would think of their team if it relocated to Canada.

That is the question: Is Toronto close enough that the Bills would still feel like “our” team? Will moving 90 minutes up the QEW remove them from our hearts and minds, or will we still stake a claim on them? Will watching the Bills on TV keep the flame of fandom burning, assuming that most of us cannot afford the $250 Toronto-market ticket?

Sadly, the ever-rising fortunes of the NFL is pricing smaller-market teams out of the market. I do not want to ruin any-one’s Sunday. But by all indications, and despite various efforts, odds are the Bills will go when Ralph Wilson passes on. We wish the 89-year-old owner many more healthy years. But no one lasts forever.

Wilson said he will not pass the team to his wife, which would allow the Bills to stay in the family (and in Buffalo), while avoiding a big estate tax bill. Wilson said he will not cut a pre-mortem deal with prospective owners to keep the Bills here, because the team is worth (and could be sold for) far more if relocated to a deep-pockets metropolis.

Longtime fans and Buffalo boosters have criticized Wilson on both counts. But the cold, hard fact remains: It is his team, not ours. He — as always — will do what he wants with it. Unless someone persuades him otherwise, the Mayflower vans will probably arrive when the owner departs. Toronto, a cross-border boom town and already the site of eight future games, is a likely destination.

It could be worse. Ninety miles up the QEW is a better location than, say, a cross-country trek to Los Angeles, the continent’s other covetous NFL-less metropolis. Indeed, plenty of Buffalonians root for the baseball Blue Jays, a team with no Buffalo roots. Plenty of folks in Rochester and Syracuse — cities about as far removed from Buffalo as Toronto is from us — claim the Bills as their home team.

Of course, those upstate cities are not separated from Buffalo by an international border, which may heighten the psychological barrier between here and Toronto. But still, Toronto is not far away. The Bills would remain the closest NFL team to us. And we have a half-century of sentiment tying us to them. Will it be enough that they still will feel like “our” team?