From 14 Years of Pain to the Sabres' Edge of Real Hope

Buffalo has spent more than a decade living through the kind of misery that turns fan bases into historians, and this story lays out how the franchise got here. The Sabres have taken the long road from the darkness of those lean years to standing on the doorstep of something far more meaningful. That kind of turn rarely happens by accident, and in this league the gap between “almost there” and “seriously dangerous” is where the real story lives.