Buffalo Opens a $2.2 Billion Stadium and the Crowd's First Act Is to Watch a Quarterback Score Five Times

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — The Buffalo Bills spent $2.2 billion on a new stadium, and the sellout crowd of 60,644 that showed up for the first game inside it had, as its first order of business, the collective decision to watch a quarterback score five times in one game. The stadium opened with a fireworks show over the field, and then it opened with a second, longer fireworks show in the end zone, and the two shows taken together were, in the words of one fan in the nosebleeds, “the reason I paid $180 for this seat.” The $180, it turned out, was the cheap part of the night.

The game was the Bills’ 41-31 win over the Detroit Lions on Thursday, the first regular-season game at Highmark Stadium, and the scoreboard was, for the first time in the building’s very brief history, a thing nobody in the building was complaining about. Josh Allen accounted for all five of Buffalo’s touchdowns — three passing, two rushing — and in doing so became, per the record books, the first quarterback since 1960 to record at least three passing touchdowns and three rushing touchdowns through his team’s first two games of a season. The record had been waiting, in a sense, for a building like this, and the building had been waiting for a night like this, and the two had finally been in the same room at the same time.

The Lions, for their part, were the team that had to walk into the new stadium and lose 41-31 in it, a fact the Lions’ players addressed in the postgame with a word that had, itself, been found: “a thing.” A 41-31 loss, in a brand-new $2.2 billion building, in front of a sellout that had just watched the home quarterback do the thing that had not been done since 1960, is, to be fair, a thing. It is also, to be fair, the kind of thing you do not want on your résumé the week the résumé is being written by the crowd in the nosebleeds.

The building already has a nickname — “The House that Allen built” — which is to say the building is a $2.2 billion building that a quarterback has, in a sense, paid for, or at least has made look like a $2.2 billion building, which is the distinction the fans are not making. The fans are making the other distinction, which is the one between the price of the seat and the value of the night, and in that distinction the seat was, by the second quarter, a bargain, and by the fourth quarter it was, in the words of the same fan, “the best $180 I have spent, and I have spent worse $180.”

The Lions left the building with a 41-31 loss and a new piece of folklore, which is the folklore of the team that lost the first game in the building, which is a folklore that will, in a sense, be told in the building, by the people in the building, to the people who come to the building, for the next twenty years, in which time the $2.2 billion will, in a sense, have been a thing, and the 41-31 will, in a sense, have been a thing, and the 1960 will, in a sense, have been a thing that was, at last, answered.

At press time, the stadium had one game in it, the scoreboard had one 41-31 in it, the quarterback had one record in it, and the crowd had, in fact, found the word, and the word was “incredible,” and the incredible was, in a sense, the whole point.