Sunday salon at the Sportsmen’s Tavern: NASCAR, the auto bailout, and a Bills win against the NFL’s worst team.

Seeing no open receivers with the clock ticking towards zero, Trent Edwards tucked the ball under his arm and took off for the Kansas City goal line.

With three Chiefs defenders converging on him from diverse angles, Buffalo’s recently maligned quarterback lunged, somehow twisting himself between the trio and into the end zone, giving the Bills a 30-17 halftime lead and the firmest of grips on last Sunday’s game.

Had any one of the errant defenders hit Edwards squarely before he reached his destination, the clock would have run out, sending Buffalo to the locker room grasping at a six-point lead against a team that had won just one of its first 10 games.

The reaction from those gathered at Mark’s North Buffalo home was hopeful, but far from emphatic. The reticence was understandable, given the four-game losing streak that dampened Buffalo’s 5-1 start, as well as the quarterback’s vital role in the skid.

“I thought he was going to get blasted again,” said Pommy, conjuring the memory of the devastating shot in the early moments of the Arizona game that separated Edwards from consciousness and the Bills from their unbeaten record.

“Is Trent back?” wondered Mark, who can usually be counted on to emphatically come down on one side or the other of any issue, football-related or not. Such hesitancy by a man who produced “Council of Trent” T-shirts last summer in anticipation of a breakout season stemmed from Edwards’ steady regression through losses to all three of Buffalo’s division rivals. More recently, and most gallingly, he bottomed out with three interceptions on his first seven throws during a Monday-night loss to Cleveland.

Edwards did eventually help wipe out a 10-point Browns lead in the fourth quarter, then guide his team within range—if only just—of a game-winning field goal attempt, but his early putridity provided the lasting narrative in the days leading up to Buffalo’s visit to Kansas City.

“I think he’s a long way back—he was in a depression,” Pommy said of the month that had passed since Buffalo’s last victory, during which Edwards had seemingly lost both his ability to find open receivers quickly and to deliver the ball accurately, which are pretty important qualities for a quarterback.

None of us in Mark’s living room—our generous-to-a-fault host, Pommy, Sammy, or your narrator—was wearing the commemorative T-shirts, though we all own at least one.

“You wanted him to pass, but you didn’t want him to pass,” Mark said, encapsulating the emotions felt while Edwards rolled to the left, surveying the Kansas City secondary, before embarking on his dash.

That first scoring run recalled another frantic scramble at Arrowhead Stadium, almost exactly eight years earlier, by another embattled Buffalo quarterback during a largely forgotten Bills season.

On November 19, 2000, Rob Johnson had been restored as the starting quarterback by then-coach Wade Phillips, even though Doug Flutie had quarterbacked Buffalo through a three-game winning streak that revived playoff hopes.

In a deafening stadium against an aggressive defense, Johnson put together one of the finest all-around performances of his wildly erratic career. Having already thrown for two touchdowns, Johnson ran for a third in the closing moments, helicoptering across the goal line for the decisive points in a 21-17 win over the Chiefs.

At last, some thought (or hoped), the mobile, strong-armed, intuitive Johnson the Bills had traded for three years earlier had fully arrived. A few naïve newspaper columnists—ahem—even declared so in print.

We all know how that worked out.

The Buffalo defense was ravaged by injuries a week later in Tampa and Johnson proved incapable of carrying an imbalanced team. Still, his performance in Kansas City and relative youth helped the team’s incoming hierarchy of team president Tom Donahoe and coach Gregg Williams select him over Flutie that offseason. After another tumultuous season of good moments dotting dreadful stretches, Johnson was jettisoned.

Edwards’ big day also needs a healthy dose of perspective. He read the defense more efficiently, spread his throws around to seven different receivers and made bold choices when necessary, particularly on the two touchdown runs. He did not absorb a sack, throw an interception, or lose a fumble against a defense that came in ranked second in the NFL in takeaways.

He also accomplished all of this against an absolutely horrid team whose defenders appeared more interested in pulling the ball free than in actually tackling Buffalo’s runners or receivers.

Things got so bad for Kansas City’s offense that quarterback Tyler Thigpen could not even surrender properly.

With Buffalo up by 20 points in the third quarter, Thigpen—one of four Chiefs quarterbacks this season—scrambled up the middle and attempted to skid along the turf, as those playing his position are allowed to do in order to avoid decapitation. Rather than sliding feet-first, though, Thigpen simply flopped down, knocking the ball free in the process. The turnover, one of his three on the afternoon, set up a Rian Lindell field goal that made it 40-17.

By that point, we had migrated west to the Sportsmen’s Tavern, where attention was divided between the worsening blowout on the two televisions, debate over the annual chili cook-off conducted during the first half, and the polka band setting up on the stage, ready to commence as the game ended.

For most of the Bills season, the team had to share television time with Sunday-afternoon NASCAR races. The Sprint Cup series had ended a week earlier, with Jimmie Johnson winning his third straight championship.

“Usually, we have the race on the big TV,” said Dwane, who owns the place and so gets to make such decisions. “The game goes on the little one.”

Dwane was a bit down after finishing second in the chili competition, though he acknowledged the fine work done by the winner, J.R. He was also less than impressed by Buffalo’s blowout victory.

“They’re playing the worst team in the league,” he said, which would have made fans of the Detroit Lions feel a little better about themselves, were there any around. “Against that defense, they should beat them 100-0.”

The Bills did make it a little more than halfway there, scoring the most points the franchise had compiled in one day since 1966. But the thrashing did little to dispel the notion that Buffalo’s four-game autumnal skid had doomed a season that once seemed certain to extend into January. Even with the win, Buffalo remains in last place in the AFC East at 6-5, tied with Miami, which holds the tiebreaker edge by virtue of its 25-16 win on October 26. Every team ahead of the Bills in the division and wild-card standings is playing as well or better than expected. None, save the Dolphins, look capable of the sort of collapse that the Bills would need to regain the lofty position they held after four games.

There is, however, plenty to be accomplished the rest of the way, even if the playoff chase is in vain. First on the list is eliminating any doubt that Edwards is the quarterback of the present and future.

“Is the Council of Trent back?” Sammy said as the Bills started to take control in the second quarter, posing a question that will not be definitively answered until the end of December.