Tom E. Curran • E-mail

The Patriots' treatment of the Bills last year bordered on inhumane.

A 38-7 beating the first time they met. A 56-10 de-pantsing on national television the second time the teams met.

In the sanctuary of their locker room after the game, Bills crumpled to the cold tile in the team’s shower. Violated. They sobbed.

Flash forward and...well, well, well lookie what we have this year. A Patriots team knocked from Olympus. A Patriots team that’s 5-3 and has spent a significant portion of the year looking up at Buffalo in the standings. A Patriots team without its golden boy leader.

Now, the Bills rest their right elbow on the hood of their pickup and work a toothpick from one side of their mouth to the other. They stare hard and expressionless at these Patriots from behind mirrored sunglasses. Their left hand balls slowly into a fist then splays open again.

The Bills visit Gillette Stadium Sunday in a fight for first in the AFC East. Payback?

They’d love that. But first, they have to blot out the damage of nine straight losses to New England and the 94-17 combined beatdown applied last year.

“The fact that they’ve beaten us and beaten us soundly definitely has an effect,” said Bills coach Dick Jauron. “I’m sure it has an effect on them, too, in terms of their confidence in playing us. We just, again, we have to deal with it. We’ve been on the losing end and as I pointed out, badly, so we’ve got to try to gain a little ground on these guys.”

It won’t be easy for a Buffalo team that is already engaged in navel-gazing. Their glistening 4-0 record is now 5-3. Last week’s loss to the Jets was particularly galling. Up 7-3 in the first quarter, the Bills fumbled at their own 15, leading to a Jets field goal. Their next drive reached the Jets 9 then ended with a 92-interception return for a touchdown. They turned the ball over on downs at the Jets 8 on their next drive. They closed the game with a missed field goal and a pick at the Jets goal line.

The final score was 26-17. The Bills have 11 turnovers in their three losses. They have five in their three wins. It’s not hard to figure out why they are in a skid.

“We’ve been getting beat on a couple different plays,” explained Bills quarterback Trent Edwards. “I’ve made some skeptical decisions and (we’ve) faced some solid defensive schemes. (Those) are really the three things that have caused those (turnovers). We weren’t making those mistakes early in the season and that’s why we were going in that direction. Now we are going in the other direction because of making those mistakes and those turnovers. Like you alluded to before...you don’t know how to fix them, you just try to make sure that you’re prepared for them and don’t do them again.”

Special feature NFL's top shots A look at the best photos from Week 9, including a tumble in Denver. NBCSports.com

The Bills are undeniably a team on the rise. They are solid in all three phases — offense, defense and special teams. But they are also young. Edwards is in his second year. Four other Bills captains are nearly as new. Wide receiver Lee Evans is in just his fifth year and safeties George Wilson and Donte Whitner are in their third years. As Buffalo tries to ascend into the small group of consistently good teams in the NFL, self-inflicted damage and the fallout from it is something they’ll grapple with.

“We don’t accept the errors regardless of who makes them,” said Jauron. “We’re a professional football team, so we expect to play at a professional level. The guys work at it. They work hard all week to get ready and as I mentioned earlier, they’re so disappointed in themselves and for all of us when things happen in games. So you hold them accountable, but you don’t — you can’t accept it because we know we won’t be able to compete for what we all want in this business if we keep turning everything over.”

Edwards insisted the Bills aren’t shaken.

“I think guys are still very confident,” he stated. “I just think that we need to make sure that we are learning from these last two losses. That’s what I am trying to do personally. I don’t know if it’s because of our age. It doesn’t matter how old guys here are, they are still going to be pretty confident and need to make sure they are learning from these losses and taking away as much as they can. In order for us to be the team we want to be, we have to be able to do that and we have to be able to learn from those losses.”

And the Bills won’t be able to flip the balance of power in the AFC East until they do. Even with Matt Cassel at quarterback instead of Tom Brady, New England’s offense poses a serious threat to a Bills secondary that’s banged up (safety Donte Whitner is out, third corner Ashton Youboty is limited and corner Terence McGee is banged up). Given the ease with which the Patriots threw over Buffalo last year in the 56-10 win, that’s not a positive.

“They threw all over us and we didn’t get much going on offense either,” said Edwards. “They made a couple of big plays and that was an impressive football team last year.”

This is the biggest game of the season so far in the AFC East. And the Bills don’t have the luxury of thinking about what happened to them last year or in the last two weeks.

“The mood was a lot better from everybody including myself when we went 4-0, but the fact is you’ve got to take every week as it’s presented to you,” said Jauron. “We’ve got to take the 5-3 record and move on. We know this is just a huge game for us coming up.”

Also on NBCSports.com Beyond the Arc: No. 11 Mich. St. takes big step forward Chandler: Jeremy Lin was special even in 8th grade What NFC teams need this offseason  |  And AFC DeMarco: Dodgers could become a contender Follow us on Twitter: @NBCSports  |  And Facebook