The Bills ranked among the league leaders in wins this season and are short-listed amid the favorites to win the Super Bowl. Led by a quarterback who spent much of the season undertaking a convincing impression of an MVP candidate, the team sometimes presented football at its most elevated, an 11-man braid of beauty, a symphonic whole, a team greater than the sum of its component parts.
But not always. Some of the team’s wins have been dirty, grindy, patchy, scratchy crawl-through-the-weeds, sleep-in-the-woods, forage-for-bugs affairs. For one fan in particular, a 29-year-old who catches as many games as she can, those were the most meaningful victories. “The perfect stuff when everything is clicking? Great. [But I like] winning those games where you're playing like crap, when maybe it was horrible statistically. But you're, like, Who cares? They won. Give me those tough conditions and gritty wins.”
Those are the observations of Jessica Pegula, who speaks from a position of knowledge and experience. Currently the No. 3-ranked tennis player in the world, she’s coming off a breakthrough WTA season that saw her win 42 singles matches and an additional 31 doubles matches, the most combined wins of any pro player in 2022, male or female. Generously listed at 5'7", she’s armed with no titanic serve or splashy signature shot. She would not win a footrace against, say, her frequent doubles partner, Coco Gauff. But Jessica Pegula simply knows how to win, how to grind out victories, as she did when she started ’23 by smoking world No. 1 Iga Swiatek at the United Cup.
