Sabres might be Buffalo's best chance to snap championship drought

There are not many cities in North American sports that have been more tortured than Buffalo.

Wide right.

Four consecutive Super Bowl losses.

Brett Hull's skate. 

The longest playoff drought in NHL history.

Just gut-punch after gut-punch for a city of painfully loyal maniacs that are desperate to see one of their two major sports teams bring home a championship. For the past six or seven years, the NFL's Bills were the team that seemed to be the closest to doing it. And they were. They have an elite quarterback in Josh Allen, have been a consistent contender, and have been one of the NFL's better teams.

At the same time, the Sabres have been one of the NHL's worst teams for the past decade and a half and nowhere close to a championship due to consistently incompetent management and ownership.

But with the Sabres' 4-1 win over the Boston Bruins on Friday night, they are through to the second round and continuing what has been one of the most improbable turnarounds in recent pro sports history. 

The Sabres might be Buffalo's best hope for a championship

Everything about this situation is baffling when you consider where everything was back at the start of the NHL season.

Go back to the first week of December and tell a Buffalo sports fan that the Sabres might be their best championship hope in 2026. They would have looked at you like you were an insane person. 

The Bills were on their way to another playoff berth and starting to round into form. 

The Sabres were at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings and looking as if their playoff drought was about to reach a 15th consecutive season with no end in sight. 

And then everything changed.

The Bills' flawed roster ended up fizzling out in the divisional round. 

The Sabres, starting with the firing of general manager Kevyn Adams, all of a sudden transformed into one of the best teams in hockey, finishing the regular season on a 39-9-5 run to win the Atlantic Division. Including the playoffs, they are 43-11-5 since the first week of December. 

While they are still awaiting their second-round opponent (it will be the winner of Sunday's Tampa Bay Lightning-Montreal Canadiens Game 7), they know they will have home-ice advantage and be facing a team that is going to be physically worn down through a brutal series. It will be winnable. If they can get through it and get into the Eastern Conference Final, you are then getting into a situation where anything can happen.

It remains to be seen if this half-season run is sustainable beyond this season or if it's all just a mirage, but none of that matters right now. All that matters right now is that the Sabres have momentum, they have two high-end players in Tage Thompson and Rasmus Dahlin, and one of the most important variables in playoff hockey, a white-hot goalie in Alex Lyon. 

All of those things can add up. 

Buffalo is desperate for somebody to bring a championship to the city, and they are inching closer to finally having it happen.

It is just not the team that anybody expected it to be. The Sabres getting it done before Josh Allen and the Bills would be a plot twist literally nobody saw coming.