Bills honor Damar Hamlin in emotional win to cap ‘hard week’

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — Buffalo Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White leaned back in his chair and sighed.

“Honestly, I don’t know how some of us did it,” White said Sunday. “Just because some of us had a different view of what went on [with Damar Hamlin], and that is traumatizing.

“I’ve seen traumatic things in my life just growing up where I grew up at and just in the environment that I’ve been raised in, but it was always the end result of me walking up and seeing it. But there was never a time where I saw every event, everything transpire to the end. So, it’s tough, man.”

Less than a week removed from Hamlin collapsing on the field in front of his teammates, a stadium full of people and the world, the Bills went out in full uniform on a football field for the first time and played a game. For the entire organization, the emotional toll of Monday night and the week was felt in different ways.

In the record books, the game will go down as a 35-23 win over the New England Patriots that sealed the No. 2 seed in the AFC and gave the Bills a 13-win season. But that tells only the smallest portion of what was experienced.

White described the week leading up to the game as a “s— show” because of the closeness of the bond in the defensive backs’ room and the fact that he saw every element of Hamlin’s collapse Monday night.

“To him getting up, to him falling, to everything, it’s just something that I can’t unsee,” White said. “Everytime I close my eyes, it replays. I try watching TV, and every time the TV go to commercial, it’s just the only thing that comes to my mind, just the vision of that. So, it’s been a tough week. It’s been a tough week for our whole team. But it’s not about us right now. It’s about Damar and his family, man, and just what they had to go through. … And hopefully we’ll never have to go through this again.”

The Bills will now host the Miami Dolphins in the wild-card round of the playoffs on Sunday. But this game…