The last time the Buffalo Sabres touched the playoffs was 2011. I was ten years old.
And if I’m being honest with you, the memories I have of that postseason have almost nothing to do with the Sabres. What I remember, what most people remember, is what happened on the other side of that bracket. The Vancouver Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals to the Boston Bruins, and the city of Vancouver promptly lost its mind.
At least 140 people were injured, four of them by stabbing. Over 100 people were arrested that first night, and by the time the investigation concluded four years later, there had been 887 criminal charges laid against 301 people. The damage to the city came in at roughly $4 million CAD, closer to $5.48 million adjusted for today. Stores were looted. Cars were burned. People were stabbed. The most famous image to come out of that night was somehow a couple kissing in the middle of the riot, which is either corny as hell or romantic as hell depending on your disposition. I fall somewhere in the middle.
And now I look at the 2025-26 Vancouver Canucks, sitting dead last in the entire NHL, 32nd out of 32, and their fanbase has just… accepted it. It feels almost eerie by comparison. They are the descendants of the 2011 rioters. The “ancestors” burned down a city block. The children are stoically watching a last place team and logging off. Where’s your rage, Vancouver?
But I digress. The point is this: Buffalo left those playoffs quietly. And then they disappeared for fourteen seasons.
I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on a decade and a half of Sabres hockey. But I’ll admit I was having a hard time actually conceptualizing how long fourteen seasons really is. Because you can wave your hand at it and say, yeah, fourteen seasons, that’s a hell of a drought, that’s historical, sure…but how much has really changed? It doesn’t sound like that big of a number when you just say it out loud.
So let me show you.
The World That Happened While the Sabres Were Gone
When the Sabres last played a playoff game, Osama bin Laden was still alive. He was killed by Navy SEALs in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, the same spring those playoffs were happening. There are adults who will watch Buffalo’s first playoff game this year who have no memory of this. Mine is fuzzy at best.
Gay marriage was not legal in the United States. That didn’t happen until the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. The Sabres missed four full seasons before that civil right existed. Entire relationships began, flourished, and led to legal marriages in the time Buffalo spent sitting at home in April.
The iPhone 4 was the current iPhone. Not the 4S. Not the 5C that had the entirety of my middle school under its spell. The 4. We are now somewhere in the high teens of iPhone numbering and I genuinely can’t keep track anymore because there’s a new one every time I turn around. The Sabres have missed roughly eleven iPhone generations.
The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe happened. In 2011, the Avengers hadn’t even come out yet. The Sabres have since missed the entire Infinity Saga, the Multiverse Saga, and whatever phase we’re supposedly in now. Iron Man died. The Sabres: still not in the playoffs.
Taylor Swift released Speak Now, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Red, Red (Taylor’s Version), 1989, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), reputation, Lover, folklore, evermore, Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department, and The Life of a Showgirl.
A global pandemic shut down the entire world for two years. The NHL played in a bubble with no fans and fake crowd noise piped into arenas. The Sabres watched from home, which, to be fair, is where the rest of us also were. At least they fit in.
Game of Thrones premiered, ran for eight seasons, became one of the most beloved shows in television history, and then ended in a way that made everyone furious for a solid three years. The prequel spinoffs came. Some of them left.
And for the rapid fire round, because we’d be here all day otherwise:
Spotify wasn’t available in the US yet. Snapchat was invented. Vine was invented and then killed. Musical.ly was invented, became TikTok, almost got banned in the United States, didn’t, and now our parents are on it. One Direction formed, became the biggest band in the world, and broke up. LeBron James left Cleveland, went to Miami, won two titles, went back to Cleveland, won one there, and then went to LA. The US Women’s Soccer team won two more World Cups. Tom Brady retired, un-retired, and retired again. Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, which nobody calls it. And everyone got a Stanley Cup. The tumbler, not the trophy.
Sidney Crosby was 23. Connor McDavid was 14. Connor Bedard was 6. Macklin Celebrini was 4.
All Of This to Say
A whole generation of Sabres fans has never watched their team play a meaningful game in April as adults. Never lost sleep over a playoff series. Never experienced the heartbreak of a first round exit, which, as a Wild fan who has now had that experience more times than I can count, I want you to know is its own terrible thing. But it is still infinitely better than nothing. Maybe. Probably. Check back in with me in May.
They’re entering something that will feel genuinely new for a huge portion of their own fanbase. The team is different. The fans are older. The world around them is essentially unrecognizable from the one they left behind quietly in 2011. And I find myself emotional about it. I mean, how can you not be romantic about hockey?
Because here’s the thing about this Sabres season that makes it especially hard not to root for them: nobody saw it coming. The Sabres started 14-14-4, sat at the bottom of the Eastern Conference, and fired their general manager in December. Alex Tuch stood at the podium and said plainly that the players were a big reason why a man lost his job. And I think for a team that had probably taken several long looks at themselves in the mirror over the years, this one was the look that clicked. Because then, somehow, they went on to put together separate win streaks of 10 and 8 games within a 32-6-2 run, the best 40-game stretch by any team in recent memory.
And so here we are.
Tomorrow night, with a win against the Capitals, the Sabres can clinch a playoff spot. The drought ends. And if they don’t weasel their way in, the Red Wings will inherit the reins of the longest active drought as they quietly enter the double digits themselves. But without a dog in the Eastern Conference fight, and with the spirit of a perennial underdog living somewhere in my chest, I find myself pulling for them.
Welcome back, Buffalo
It’s a brave new world after all.
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