In the lead-up to Super Bowl LVI, the Buffalo Bills seemed primed to get over their playoff hump. For two straight years, franchise quarterback Josh Allen had gone through the same cycle of hope and heartbreak. But this time, they charged into the postseason with an 11-6 record and beat the New England Patriots in the Wild Card round. The Kansas City Chiefs awaited them at the Arrowhead next, and gave the Bills a memory so painful that it still haunts the Bills to this day.

On a recent appearance on Good Morning Football, former Bills center Mitch Morse spoke about how that fateful ‘13-Second Game’ hit Buffalo’s locker room.

“The locker room right there was so devastating, and you all do is – a really tight group of guys, we’ve all been there, and you just lean on each other,” Morse said. “And then, you know, the wound is never really healed up. That being said, that was a tough locker room to be part of.”

The game was the kind of collapse that needs a beat sheet. Buffalo scored with just 13 seconds left in the game, and that should have been it. The Bills Mafia were getting ready to go wild in the stands. But there were 13 precious seconds still on the clock, which gave the Chiefs a chance to try and rein themselves back into the game. Chiefs head coach Andy Reid told quarterback Patrick Mahomes, “When it’s grim, be the Grim Reaper.”

Mahomes duly followed.

When the Chiefs got the ball back, he connected once with WR Tyreek Hill for 19 yards, and then with Travis Kelce on a 25-yard pass. All Harrison Butker had to do then was drill a 49-yarder to tie the game and go into overtime. All in 13 seconds.

Per Go Long’s Tyler Dunne, poor decision-making in the Bills camp contributed to Buffalo coming up short.

“Thirteen seconds broke the psychology of the Bills,” he said on The Colin Cowherd Show. “He [head coach Sean McDermott) overruled the special teams coordinator, Heath Farwell, who wanted a squib kick. But McDermott had plans for a field goal. McDermott said touchback.

“They gave up the field goal. They went into overtime, they get rolled over, they get inside the locker room. And I had a coach tell me that even in that moment, Sean McDermott’s said something like, ‘The offense left too much on the field.’ … The next day is kind of looking at his assistant coaches and saying, ‘You guys need to figure out what went wrong here.’”

But for the players, this game is fresh as a daisy in their minds. Morse spoke about the same game on the Caps Off podcast earlier this year, and felt like the loss “[sucked] the soul out” of the team. Before those 13 seconds elapsed, the former offensive lineman also felt “uneasy”; the game is not over until that clock hits zero.

It hurt even more for Morse, who was living in Kansas City at that time.

After the loss, Allen told the press that the team would be “holding on” to the pain of this game to fuel them for the future. The Bills took that down to a T and have made the postseason every year since then. However, Allen has yet to play the big game. Moments like those 13 few seconds end up becoming lessons for an entire lifetime.