— — Across America, a breathless citizenry awaits the upcoming football season, except in Western New York, where another 17-week exercise in mediocrity likely awaits. The Buffalo Bills, it turns out, are not a bad team, merely an irrelevant one, quite literally the team to beat in a division where each team has rearmed impressively, except them.

Irrelevant, indeed, to the point that those NFL television promos, reinforcing the idea that one is not a fan unless he or she purchases the complete collection of home-team clothing, linens, home décor items and other regalia, pointedly excludes the Bills. The happy actors shovel snow in Patriots gear, eat cheese off Packer plates and fly their Kansas City Chiefs flags high; the Buffalo Bills stuff is nowhere to be seen.

There is a morbid aspect to being a football fan out here, and this is from an oldtimer who attended the Bills’ first open practice (1960; starting quarterback, Richie Lucas), sat week after week in the Rockpile bleachers ($3), held season tickets after the move to Orchard Park (1973) and teaches a class on how to watch football. Then factor in my willingness to study history. Liquor stores were made for people with my attitude.

 You might wonder how the Vikings will do this year, now that Brett Favre, who holds the NFL record for incomplete retirements, has returned. I observe this sturdy quarterback with the grizzled-old-man persona and note he is still young enough to be my son.

There remains an undercurrent of desperation in knowing the Bills will be sold to the highest bidder after their 90-year-old owner eventually meets his demise, or that it will occur to the team their lease or county-owned facilities are, compared to new playpens in Dallas and New York, less than adequate. The typical fan worries about these things; I think about North Tonawanda’s brief presence in professional football, back when cars had running boards.

This is another in a series of the NFL’s dirty little secrets, the somewhat unsavory history of the days when football was more like a carnival attraction than the slick and well-oiled machine it is today. Circa 1916, you organized a football team by recruiting players (some of whom were fake-named college men in search of a weekend payday), then finding a team to play, then finding a place to play and the promoting it like a rock concert. History records a team, known as the “All-Tonawanda All-Stars,” joining the National Football League’s forerunner, the American Professional Football Association, in 1921 (the franchise fee was $50) as the Tonawanda Lumbermen or the Tonawanda Kardex, losing a road game 45-0 in a driving rainstorm to a Rochester team before a crowd of 2,700, then disbanding. Zero wins, one loss, and that is how it will remain forever.

That same year, the Green Bay Packers entered the league.

Forget football for a moment. Let’s discuss hockey. Those of us who did not grow up to bend it like Gretzky often began their hockey careers with what’s become known as table-top hockey, a small replica of a rink with moveable players controlled by steel rods. You push, you pull, you turn the controls and the metal players, traveling in grooves on the surface, conspire to pass a simulated puck (or gumball, or small stack of glued-together dimes — a kid gets creative when he loses a game piece) toward a net guarded by a metal goalie himself attached to a maneuverable lever. Invented in a Toronto basement in 1932, these things never went away. They got better, to the point that every sports bar in North America now has at least one, and in the way suburban kids learned to shoot billiards in downstairs rec rooms instead of down-the-street pool halls, the techniques learned through endless childhood hours of playing hockey without actually playing hockey can still be put to use.

In 1983, a company called ICE (Innovative Concepts in Entertainment) entered a crowded market by producing the first “bubble” hockey game, known as Ice Chexx, with all the action under a clear protective dome, the perfect saloon game. What is notable is that their factory was on Young Street in Tonawanda, “not far from American Wurlitzer’s fabled jukebox factory in North Tonawanda,” as a breathless history phrased it.

Funny how a person can be touched by sports, however little his or her real involvement. That local historical society, wherein I spend too much of my time, recently came into possession of a remarkable photograph of Sheridan Drive in 1946, blocked off for a soapbox derby competition. The ramps were erected at the gentle slope where Sheridan meets Delaware Road, and parked cars and a vigorous audience are visible. That’s all that’s visible; the locations that now house McDonalds, Panera Bread, the Sheridan Plaza, the Tim Hortons and the rest were all unmowed fields at the time, awaiting suburbia to hit them.

You likely comprehend suburbia. Now, sports fans, I suppose I’ll have to explain what a soapbox derby was.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears every Friday in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.