Hans Deryk/Associated Press

Three weeks ago, my four-year-old son, Leo, wore a brand-new Bills hat his grandfather in Buffalo sent him to his Virginia preschool. It was a gift purchased in celebration of the team’s glorious 5-2 start that had all of Western New York in the kind of delirious fog of Bills fever that hasn’t gripped the region since the glory days of the 1990s.

The first day he wore the hat, Leo was promptly punched in the nose by a five-year-old Steelers fan, who told him he “hated the Bills.” The event prompted an “incident report” from the school and a stern warning from my wife, who doesn’t share my Buffalo roots.

“Are you sure you want him to be a Bills fan?” she asked. “You’re setting him up for a lifetime of harassment and disappointment.”

Leo has continued to stubbornly wear his Bills hat, but his mother’s words have turned out to be darkly prophetic, as the team has suffered three consecutive knockouts, all but devouring any hopes that the team would make the playoffs for the first time since 1999. Sure, they’re still mathematically alive, but we all know it, this season, and our hopes, are dead.

No one wants to see their children get punched, but aside from the usual hand-wringing, I also had a somewhat different take on the incident. For me, it was sort of a reminder that the Bills were back, as a team that was actually worth hating, even for five-year-olds. For most of the last decade, we’ve been pitied or ignored, but it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to actually dislike our team.

Over the last decade, when people would see me or a family member in Bills gear, we’d get mostly snickers of derision, but this season it was different. More than once, people would say things like “Hey, the Bills, you guys are actually pretty good this season,” or something along those lines. For the first time in years, we felt proud to root for the Bills.

After the week 8 shutout of the hapless Redskins, The Washington Post listed the Bills at #5 in their NFL power rankings. Even for a delusional Bills fan like me, this seemed preposterous. We expected to be in the Andrew Luck sweepstakes and instead we were a top 5 team? It seemed too good to be true and it was.

After the humbling 27-11 loss to the Jets at home in week 9, many Bills fans were prepared to write the loss off as a blip on the radar. We were still a playoff team, but perhaps a 9- or 10-win squad, rather than an 11- or 12-win team. Then after the 44-7 shellacking in Dallas, most revised their forecasts once again, with many simply hoping the team might post its first winning season since 2004.

But after the absolutely spirit-crushing 35-8 loss to Miami on Sunday, Bills fans are back in that dark place we’ve become so accustomed to for years. A 27-point loss to a 2-7 team in which the team loses two starters to injury, and goes 0-12 on third downs with zero touchdowns will do that to you. Three losses by a combined score of 106-36 will do that to you.

In the aftermath of Sunday’s debacle, it was hard to find any fan who still believes in the team. A fan named Lloyd, writing on the Buffalo News site, counseled fans to boycott the team’s remaining home games.

“Let the games black out, and save your sanity,” he wrote. “Concentrate instead on family get-togethers, enjoying dinner with one another, and finalizing the holiday shopping.”

Another fan, writing on a fan site, Two Bills Drive, offered three sarcastic reasons to “look on the bright side”:

“1) Our kickoff return team is getting a lot of practice, with 27 repetitions in the last three games. 2) You will be able to buy Bills gear on e-Bay with good selection and great prices. 3) We have a glimmer of reentering the Luck sweepstakes.”

But the Bills’ chances of securing the services of Luck are even more remote than their playoff chances. The Bills are fully capable of losing all of their remaining games, especially in light of the rash of injuries that has hit the team, but even with a 5-11 record, they are highly unlikely to be “bad” enough to get the Number One pick.

In the last 40 years, there hasn’t been a single season in which the worst team had five wins. And during that span, there has only been one year–2003–n which the worst team had even four wins. With the Colts off to a blazing 0-10 start, it’s certainly their race to lose.

So with both the playoffs and Luck looking very doubtful, the Bills are back to being a team that’s bad, but not really bad enough. In the midst of the heady, early-season revelry, the Bills signed quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick to a six-year, $59 million contract extension. Bills fans want to love Fitzpatrick, but it’s hard for even his most ardent supporters not to acknowledge that his play his slipped dramatically in the last three weeks. His average quarterback rating in the first eight weeks was 98; in the last three weeks it’s been 48.

But as bad as Fitzpatrick has been, the truth is that the Bills need a lot more than just a franchise quarterback. There are holes everywhere you look. The Buffalo News’ report card for the team’s performance against Miami featured four Fs, and a D and some complained that that assessment was too charitable.

But in assigning blame, most fans look beyond the playing field and the coaching staff and straight to Ralph Wilson, the team’s 93-year-old owner, who, critics argue, has driven the franchise into the ground with his shortsightedness, and penchant for penny-pinching.

Given the choice between an 0-16 season that landed the Bills Andrew Luck and a marginally more productive losing season that at least started out fun, I think I’d still opt for the fun start we all enjoyed. We were contenders, at least for a few weeks, and we finally beat the Patriots. There are still six games left in the season, but I think we all know that the party is over. It was fun while it lasted and now we can all wear our Bills gear again and draw just pity, rather than hate.