Bob Duff

Wide right.

No goal.

It’s painful to be a Buffalo sports fan.

The Bills lost four straight Super Bowls, a streak which commenced in Super Bowl XXV when kicker Scott Norwood’s 47-yard field goal attempt in the dying seconds of the game faded meekly to the right of the uprights.

The Sabres lost the 1998-99 Stanley Cup finals in triple overtime in the sixth game of the series on home ice when Brett Hull of the Dallas Stars slid a puck past Buffalo goalie Dominik Hasek while his skate was clearly in the goal crease, which was against league rules at the time.

The Braves, the city’s NBA franchise, left town and eventually became the Los Angeles Clippers.

OK, so maybe the last thing wasn’t all bad.

Still, rooting for the home team in Buffalo is all about the suffering. It is the close-but-no-cigar town of professional sports.

Buffalo hasn’t won a title in any of the major sports since the Bills beat the San Diego Chargers 23-0 in the 1965 American Football League championship, a league which ceased to exist in 1970.

But, as Reggie Dunlop emphatically told sportswriter Dickie Dunn in the cult hit Slap Shot, that situation is about to change.

The Sabres are young, deep, dynamic, speedy and powerful, a team in every sense of the word, with a roster well-suited for the fast-paced, up-tempo hockey which now proliferates the National Hockey League.

Which is why they are going to win the Stanley Cup next season.

Expected to miss the playoffs this season, instead the Sabres came within one victory of reaching the Stanley Cup finals, before an injury-savaged defense missing four regulars was incapable of holding off the eventual Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes.

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“It's special because seven months ago we went into camp with some lofty goals, goals that probably a lot of people would have thought were unrealistic and one was to finish first in our division, and one was to go out and win a Stanley Cup,” said Sabres coach Lindy Ruff, the longest-serving active head coach. “We really thought it was possible and you might say that every coach is going to say that at the start of training camp, but I think you saw the way we treated our lineup, the players that we had there previously.”

“We believed in the players we had.”

Buffalo goes four lines deep, with a 20-goal scorer on every line and veteran leadership from former Stanley Cup winner Chris Drury, Mike Grier and Daniel Briere and young, emerging talents such as Derek Roy, Maxim Afinogenov, Jason Pominville and Paul Gaustad made their presence known during Buffalo’s Stanley Cup run.

The defense may not ice a superstar, but Jay McKee, Dmitri Kalinin, Toni Lydman, Henrik Tallinder and Teppo Numminen from top to bottom are as solid a unit as any team in the league ices, although McKee, who led the NHL in shot blocks, is an unrestricted free agent and must be resigned.

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Rookie Ryan Miller, a Hobey Baker Award winner at Michigan State, established himself as a legitimate front-line NHL goaltender in the playoffs and behind him, Martin Biron is a veteran with solid experience.

The last time the Sabres came this close, they reached the 1997-98 Eastern Conference finals and lost to a surprising Washington Capitals team, then rebounded the following spring to return to the conference final and defeat Toronto to earn the shot to play Dallas for the Stanley Cup.

Then it all went awry, another heartbreak for Buffalo. The team fell into bankruptcy, top players were moved or let go and the Sabres missed the playoffs for three successive seasons.

“It was gut wrenching to lose some of the players that we lost through our bankruptcy and the different situations,” Ruff said.

“If you go from '99 to now, there's a pretty good peak to a pretty good valley,” added Sabres general manager Darcy Regier. “So we haven't peaked yet hopefully and that continues. But there were some very tough times there financially, where we would have conversations day to day wondering were we going to be in Buffalo? Were we going to be elsewhere? Were we going to be at all?”

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New ownership took over and the Sabres rebuilt from within, developing a strong farm system link with their AHL club in Rochester and that’s about to pay dividends in hungry, desperate-for-success Buffalo.

“We also know it's special when you get to this point again because it's tough to do,” Ruff said.

Finding another team in the East with the capabilities to unseat Buffalo as the leading contender is difficult. Carolina found it difficult to regroup following its 2002 Stanley Cup finals appearance and it’s likely that the grind of a 25-game playoff run will wear the Hurricanes down again.

Small-market Ottawa is overburdened with unrestricted free agents — defensemen Zdeno Chara and Wade Redden can both leave — not to mention a huge question mark in goal. Oft-injured Hasek, 41, wants to return, but do the Senators really want to roll the dice on his fragile body for another year?

Philadelphia and the New York Rangers were proven to be frauds in the playoffs and New Jersey is no longer the depth-laden, defensive dynamo that captured three Cups between 1995-2003. Toronto should improve under new coach Paul Maurice, but not nearly enough to challenge for a Cup.

Maurice made no promises of ending Toronto’s 35-year Stanley Cup drought when he accepted the position with the Maple Leafs. "I think sometimes by saying that, you almost cheapen how difficult it is to get there," said Maurice, who took Carolina to the 2002 final before losing to Detroit.

"Winning the Stanley Cup is a tremendous, tremendous task."

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