Welcome to the ice, your Buffalo Sabres!

Boys and girls, please turn your attention to the Buffalo Sabres. They fight hard, they rally for their fans, and since they play 82 games every season, a bitter loss once and awhile isn’t quite so hard to take. Whenever the Bills fail to impress their loyal following, the Sabres seem to pick up the slack and try that much harder to give their city something to celebrate. Sure, they just lost two games in a row, but they also have one of the best goalies in the league and let our AHL goalie get a shot at the big time. That’s a coach who genuinely cares not just about the stats, but about his players. Where else in the NHL would a coach let an inexperienced minor league goalie start (and finish) against one of their biggest rivals? But that’s the great thing about Buffalo. Winning is without a doubt important to Lindy Ruff and his aspiring team, but they never lose sight of the fact that they’re all lucky enough to be playing a sport that millions of kids grow up playing.

Every NHL player, in some way, gets to stay a kid forever. Where some people have to get up every day and sit behind a desk, these lucky few have a gift that allows them to make millions of dollars playing a game. A game. It’s not even called a job, fans don’t go watch the Sabres work against the Maple Leafs. We go see them play. You don’t go root for your financial advisor, you root for Paul Gaustad every time you watch his fist connect with an opponent, and as they fall to the ice, you jump out of your seat. The excitement, the electricity, that flows through HSBC Arena every time the Buffalo Sabres step on the ice is a phenomenon that cannot be explained in words, but every person reading this who has ever been a part of a Sabres win, whether at home or at the arena, knows the feeling I’m talking about. There is nothing quite like being one of 18,690 people, all there for one reason, and all united in their common love for hockey.

In what other city could a team sell out 49 straight games without winning the Stanley Cup? It happened here. In fact, it’s completely acceptable to us that the team hasn’t brought home a Stanley Cup yet, and last season we really didn’t play as well as we could have. But other than last season, our team has landed in the playoffs every season since the lockout, and that’s something our city can, and will, brag about.

There’s nothing quite like a Sabres fan. No one judges you for jumping on the bandwagon when we went to the playoffs, no one cares if you sit in the 300s or in a box, and it doesn’t matter what town you’ll head home to after the game. For 2 ½ hours every person in that building is equal and when Connolly nudges that overtime goal past Emery's skate, the closest person to you becomes your best friend, whether you know each other or not. You may leave never knowing your neighbor’s name, but you’ll know the way it feels to be hugged by a stranger because, my friends, there isn’t a Sabres fan around that hasn’t celebrated a win with a giant bear hug.