Big losers a kick away from glory

Scott Norwood pushes the crucial kick wide in the 1991 Super Bowl.

Snow town of Buffalo produced unbelievably talented team who always choked at the end, despite being the only team to play in four successive Super Bowl finals

There were plenty of sporting losers in 2015, and there will be just as many in the 12 months to follow, but none will surpass the greatest losers in the history of sports.

The new ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Four Falls of Buffalo, which hit New Zealand screens last weekend, tells the scarcely believable tale of the Buffalo Bills in the early 1990s.

The Bills defied all odds to make it to four straight Super Bowls from 1991 to 1994. And, in the showpiece game in American sport, they defied even greater odds to lose on all four occasions. To put that in context, no other franchise has even played three successive Super Bowls, let alone lost them all.

Imagine what that does to a team, to a set of driven athletes whose entire lives are dedicated to accomplishing one highly specific goal, whose careers are then marred by falling agonisingly short of that goal again and again ... and again and again.

Imagine being a running punchline for the past 20 years, suffering the ignominy of becoming a commonly used shorthand for serial losers or failing in the clutch.

Those fascinating scenarios form the basis of Four Falls, a fantastic documentary that attempts to investigate what went wrong and what happened to those unfortunate athletes in the aftermath.

The title of the movie is derived from both the season in which every football team possesses grand dreams and the location of Buffalo at the head of the Niagara River. Because, as the opening passage describes, the Buffalo Bills of the early 1990s, just like the Niagara Falls, were swift, powerful and travelled long journeys, even if it meant falling in spectacular fashion at the end.

And it was spectacular, especially the first time. Merely reaching their maiden Super Bowl was hailed as the "greatest moment in Buffalo sports history" and, in a town known for snow and little else, it's easy to see why the achievement earned such significance.

The Bills were heavily favoured to beat the New York Giants but the game came to be defined by two words that continue to haunt the city of Buffalo: wide right.

With eight seconds left and trailing by one point, Scott Norwood had the chance to play hero and kick what would have been a game-winning 47-yard field goal. But Norwood pushed the ball past the right upright and the Bills headed home with their first taste of heartbreak.

Watching the footage during Four Falls, several players treat the failure with a level of wry amusement that only the passage of time can create. Except Norwood, who is close to tears as he describes the incident.

Buffalo would never again come so close, losing to the Redskins the following year before suffering a pair of heavy defeats in the early days of the Dallas Cowboys' dynasty.

The Bills, talking at the time and in the present, liked to define their legacy as a team who were often knocked down but always found their feet. That's true, but it was hardly the view shared by the rest of America.

Opponents taunted them as "experienced losers", reporters repeatedly asked players that terrifying question: "What if you lose again?" Beverly Hills 90210 and The X-Files took shots at the team, who were eventually ascribed the unfortunate acronym of Boy I Love Losing Superbowls.

They became a synonym for choking and it's only in the film's final shots, which feature doctored footage of Norwood's kick sailing between the uprights, that the world's greatest losers finally emerge triumphant.