For God’s sake, can’t we get a decent pro sports team in this town? The Bills are chronic losers. Now the Sabres are in free-fall.

It is bad enough dealing with the winter wind howling off of the lake, with a stuck-in-neutral economy, with the national image of a canker sore, without enduring the seemingly inevitable demise of the pro teams that carry our name.

The Romans held circuses to distract the masses from reality. We have the hapless Bills and now, a great-expectations hockey team in free-fall.

We need distractions from our distractions. That’s how bad things have gotten. We can only take so much abuse –and that, make no mistake, is what this is about.

The habitual failure of our major pro sports teams corrodes the communal psyche. It’s especially true in a smaller city that wears its battered heart on its tattered sleeve.

When the Bills or Sabres win, everybody’s load feels lighter. Fans wear the team colors and feel like its success reflects the worth of themselves and the community. Sociologists call it BIRGing –Basking In Reflected Glory. With losing teams, fans do the opposite. They either get angry and vent on sports talk radio, or turn their backs. It’s called CORFing– Cutting Off Reflected Failure.

Buffalo has turned CORFing into an art form. A long, inglorious history of mostly mediocre sports teams seemingly confirms the worst of what the world thinks about us –and reinforces a communal inferiority complex borne of a half-century of decline.

As sports sociologist Merrill Melnick once told me, “Buffalo is frequently put down and made to feel second-class.… People want to associate with greatness, especially if one doesn’t perceive oneself as especially great, unique or special.”

Instead of uplifting the communal psyche, these teams assault it. The Sabres’ high expectations this season only intensified the impact of their fall.

It is not just that they lose. It is the unaggressive, white-gloved way they lose.

More than anything, I think people want –and in the team’s 41-season history, have seldom gotten –a hockey team that reflects the tough, battle-the-elements image and reality of this place.

It is a maddening irony. This city was built on hard labor, yet its hockey team – more often than not –is overstuffed with players who do not like to get their hands dirty.

If nothing else, Buffalo is admired for the toughness of a populace that deals with fierce winters and a grim economy while retaining a hold on heavy industry. Our built environment still is marked by smokestacks and the bulk of grain elevators and a City Hall that stands big-shouldered against the wind with a solidity that screams, “Bring it on.”

All of it conveys a might and a muscle and an honesty of purpose and character that does not exist in softer, tonier burgs. Yet our hockey teams are habitually overpopulated with mannerly gentlemen who, when it comes to the game’s physical aspect, prefer to defer. It is a recipe for failure in a contact sport and–more to my point –a formula for embarrassment in a no-excuses town. The November mugging–with no retribution –of the team’s goalie in Boston in front of 18,000 witnesses felt like a communal humiliation.

This hockey season is all but beyond salvaging. Which means that deep-pocketed owner Terry Pegula has the chance, in time, to do what the Sabres seldom have done: Assemble a team whose character and grit reflects the place in which they play.

I don’t think it is too much to ask. Lord knows, we have suffered enough.

desmonde@buffnews.comnull