Jets just playing in a high-stakes game vs. Bills is a win

There is a difference this time — a good difference, a painful difference, an anxious difference, a satisfying difference. Maybe you didn’t sleep quite as late as you normally would have, because sitting in the immediate recess of your brain was what will begin just after 1 o’clock. It has been a while since it has felt quite this way.

Football is different from other sports precisely because it allows for days like this. In the other sports, if you allow yourself to get too worked up about one game, and that game doesn’t have the ability to end your season, you’ll wind up in a straitjacket before too long. In football, it’s all that you want.

You want a Sunday that matters.

You want a 1 o’clock with meaning.

The Jets’ season won’t end Sunday afternoon, even if everything goes sideways in Orchard Park, N.Y., even if the Bills batter the Jets for three hours and the Jets walk off the field having been shifted from the “safely in” to the “in the hunt” column of the playoff picture. So the stakes aren’t essential.

But, man. For the first time in a long, long time, it feels like a game that will toy with your emotions on every snap if your chosen colors are green and white and your team of choice is the Jets, 7 wins and 5 losses on the season, trying to make a statement that would be loud enough to be heard in every precinct of the NFL.

“It’s a division game, so it’s always going to be a bear to play a division opponent,” head coach Robert Saleh said this week. “Offensively, I feel like they’re pretty healthy, they were healthy back then, they are now. It’s going to be a challenge, to play a division opponent twice, it’s hard. It’s hard because you’re trying to come up with schemes that keep them on their heels, but at the same time there’s a balance, in terms of how you do things.

“But they’re uber-talented, they’re on 10 days’ rest, playing at home. It’s a great opportunity, big-time division game, so it’s going to be fun.”

Fun playing the game, maybe. Fun coaching the game.

But watching? As a fully invested fan? Yeah. That will either be torture or bliss, nothing in between. There was some of that last week, for Jets fans hoping the team would walk into Minneapolis and topple the Vikings. Bliss actually seemed possible until the Vikings blitzed bliss 36 inches away from the end zone.

Still, that was a non-conference foe. It was a week earlier in the calendar.

This is different. This is the Bills, a team against which the Jets’ history stretches, literally, back to the beginning — a 27-3 win for the then-Titans over the Bills at the Polo Grounds on Sept. 11, 1960, the first game in the history of both teams. This is the Bills, which the Jets stunned five weeks ago, sending the presumptive Super Bowl favorites into a brief crisis.

This is Buffalo, a city starved for a championship after 57 years without one, a town that loves its football team with more fervor and more fury than just about any other. This is Buffalo, with an 80 percent chance of rain in the forecast, with a fan base that has been salivating for revenge, has an insatiable appetite for games like this and hasn’t seen the Bills play a home game in almost a month.

But these are the Jets, and five weeks ago when they reduced Josh Allen to a puddle at MetLife Stadium, they officially announced themselves as legit. They still believe they are legit, and falling a few points shy at Minnesota last week didn’t alter that belief. They have offered their proper respect for the Bills. But they also know what a win Sunday will mean.

“I think it’s going to be a really good test for the team,” Jets quarterback Mike White said. “It’s obviously a very tough place to play. It’s a very good team. They’re rolling right now, so it’s going to be a battle. I’m looking forward to it.”

And why not? So many similar Sundays these past few years have been tours through the Red Zone Channel for Jets fans, looking for games that matter, always somewhere else. Not this time. Not this Sunday. No doubt where you’ll be just after 1 o’clock. Nowhere you’d rather be, either.