It is early January, 1993 and Buffalo Bills fans are somewhere in the midst of elation and bewilderment after their team rushed off the field at Rich Stadium with a 41-38 AFC playoff victory over Houston, the largest comeback in NFL history.

There was only one way to describe the scene at Rich Stadium – fandemonium.

One voice painted the picture for Bills fans for 43 years throughout all the highs and lows – the unmistakable tone of Dunkirk native Van Miller.

In a career spanning more than five decades, Miller would announce just about everything imaginable and has been honored with induction into six halls of fame, including earning a spot in Canton.

PLANTING THE SEEDS OF A HALL OF FAME CAREER IN DUNKIRK

It all began with a spot calling high school basketball on Dunkirk’s WFCB in 1950, when Miller called the station manager and told him he could do a better job than the station’s announcer at the time. After a tryout calling Dunkirk High basketball, Miller was hired and quickly became program director.

“I did everything there,” Miller recalled from his Erie County home last week.

Miller practically lived on the air in those days – a typical Saturday found him hosting a three-hour morning show on WFCB, calling Fredonia State basketball or professional wrestling with names such as Gorgeous George and Lou Thesz, another studio show and live remotes past midnight.

Van Miller called Bills games from their inception until his retirement in 2003 as the longest-tenured commentator with one team – 37 years – in pro football history.

A basketball and football standout at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Dunkirk and later Dunkirk High School, injuries put a quick end to his athletic career. After a bus accident left him with a broken back and forced him to lie flat for 10 weeks as the injury healed, he decided how he would make a living.

“I said, I love sports, I’m going to talk about them,” he recalled.

Miller would take a tape recorder with him to games in the area and practice his technique and style. It would pay off in his gig at WFCB and after five years of broadcasting in Dunkirk, he received a call from WBEN in Buffalo offering a summer replacement announcing job. It was guaranteed for just three months, but Miller took the offer.

Three months turned into a 55-year partnership as he began by calling games for the University at Buffalo and Niagara University for the station. When the Bills joined the newly-formed American Football League in 1960, it was Miller’s work calling UB football games which caught the attention of the new franchise.

The work of a major football play-by-play announcer brought several more challenges in those days than the three-man booths and countless production crew members involved in today’s NFL broadcasts. Miller called Bills games by himself, covering all of the pre-and-post-game show, halftime show and game action.

FROM ‘THE ROCKPILE’ TO THE SUPER BOWL

During those early years, Miller was there for some of the Bills’ finest moments, at the microphone for the team’s AFL championships in 1964 and 1965 inside War Memorial Stadium.

“It was a very friendly place to broadcast from because everyone was close to the field,” Miller said. “We had a big broadcast booth, but I had to duck around pillars. There were steel pillars we had to duck around to see the game. It was one of a kind.”

For eight years during the 1970s, the Bills moved to a rival network, marking the only seasons Miller did not serve as the team’s play-by-play man. During those seasons, he took over the announcing duties for the Buffalo Braves, the city’s NBA team. His NBA work filled out an incredible resume – he has worked NCAA and NIT games on television, several years of play-by-play with the Buffalo Bisons, as well as soccer, golf tournaments, marathons, bowling, newscasts and weather, and hosted the local version of ‘It’s Academic,’ and was sports director for WBEN-TV/WIVB for many years.

The key to his success – calling the games right down the middle.

“I tried to be very objective,” he said. “I’d give Dan Marino as much credit as Jim Kelly. I never said ‘we,’ it was always the Buffalo Bills because I hated homers.”

Bills fans today could never forget the team’s run of four straight AFC championships during the early 90s, with Miller’s calls there every Sunday to set the stage – trademarks such as ‘fandemonium’ and ‘do you believe it?’ made him a household name.

Perhaps his most famous call coincides with Buffalo’s most painful sports moment.

“They should’ve won the first Super Bowl,” Miller said of Super Bowl XXV, a game encapsulated by NFL Films’ highlight of Scott Norwood’s infamous ‘Wide Right,’ accompanied by Miller’s portrait-painting description of Buffalo’s slide from Super Bowl dreams to anguish.

“They had beaten the Giants at the Meadowlands and they did it without Jim Kelly,” Miller remembered. “That’s the game that really got away.”

For each of the four Super Bowl defeats, Miller was at the call on the Bills’ radio network. While disappointed with the result, he kept the games in perspective.

“I took the attitude that it’s only a game,” Miller said. “The Super Bowls never bothered me, even losing the first one. Dallas had great teams and were just better than Buffalo. The game that bothered me the worst was when the Bills went into Tennessee to play the Titans.”

A moment which would go down as ‘The Music City Miracle’ to those outside Buffalo still haunts the Bills’ voice as it does the team’s fans.

“I looked over on the bench and saw all the guys high-fiving (after a Steve Christie field goal put Buffalo ahead with seconds remaining),” Miller remembered. “The first words out of my mouth were, they’d better be ready for the lateral play.

“(Then Bills head coach) Wade Phillips wanted the ball kicked as deep as they could, or as hard as they could on the ground. Instead (special teams coach) Bruce DeHaven told them to kick a pooch punt. It was just unbelievable. It was absolutely terrible.”

On the other hand, the greatest game Miller remembers was perhaps the most unlikely victory he, or any other Bills fan ever witnessed – ‘The Comeback.’

“I’d given up on it,” Miller said of Buffalo’s 1993 victory over Houston at Rich Stadium. “That was the greatest game I’ve been a part of; I don’t think that will ever be repeated. So many people had left and then later were trying to get back in the stadium because the game was blacked out on television.”

The games live on for the Bills’ play-by-play man just as they do in the minds of so many Western New York fans.

“I think about those games and how they should have won that first Super Bowl,” Miller said. “They come back from time to time; they do.”

WNY’S ‘FANDEMONIUM’

The on-field memories of Buffalo’s highs and lows of the 90s and their Super Bowl runs remain for Miller, but they are close accompanied by the fervor with which Bills fans followed their team. Even with a conflict overseas, Bills news took the top headlines of the day.

“Desert Storm was going on at the time. Did we open the (television) show with what was going on in Desert Storm? No, we were in a bar some place with fans wearing their Bills gear,” Miller said, laughing. “It was crazy, unbelievable the response the team got.”

Local fans’ love for their team, even in defeat, makes Buffalo a special sports market, Miller said.

“There’s no question Buffalo fans are as loyal as anywhere in the country,” he added. “Here in Buffalo, we had the greatest audience share of any market in the country including Green Bay. The people are just fanatic when it comes to the Bills.”

Through the years, Miller saw football grow in ways few could have imagined during the days of the AFL. That league played a vital role in what the NFL was to become, though, he said.

“The American Football League has to get a lot of credit. Originally the NFL didn’t have names on the jerseys, a time clock on the field, the two-point conversion. The AFL did so much to improve the game,” he said. “They made it a passing game. But the growth was inevitable because it’s the ideal sport – the stars only come to your town once a year, it isn’t like other sports where you see the biggest names again and again.”

In this 1965 photo archived by the Buffalo Broadcasters Association, Van Miller sets to hike the ball to Bills quarterback Jack Kemp.

Miller still follows the game, and the Bills, closely, and like most NFL fans, can only shake his head when it comes to the league’s current lockout.

“It’s like the movie Mutiny on the Bounty,” he said. “I say, why should there be mutiny when there is bounty? There’s $9 billion to split up.”

It’s a situation, he said, which has had the writing on the wall for years.

“(Former NFL commissioner) Paul Tagliabue gave away the store – he gave the players 60 percent of total revenues. Ralph Wilson said we can’t live with this. They all maligned Ralph, but he was right, and that’s what the problem is today,” Miller said. “The players today don’t care about the old players, the guys who built this game up. The players are receivers, they’re not givers. They’ve got to go to the bargaining table; they’re not going to win in litigation.”

A SPOT WITH FOOTBALL’S IMMORTALS

When speaking about the greatest players he witnessed during his decades of sportscasting, many obvious names came up – Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Bruce Smith, Andre Reed, Cookie Gilchrist, and Tom Sestak among them. The name which stands out atop the crowd for Miller, though, played on the basketball court.

“Calvin Murphy, pound for pound, was the greatest athlete I ever broadcast for,” he said of the Niagara University standout.

Throughout his announcing career, Miller had several opportunities to leave Western New York, including offers from major networks. A desire to stay close to his home and the mother who raised him in Dunkirk kept him here, though.

In 2004, a year after hanging up the headset, Miller earned one of the greatest honors bestowed to a broadcaster as the NFL Hall of Fame presented him with the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award, making him one of 12 play-by-play announcers to accept the credit.

Miller has a second spot in Canton – the spotting boards made for him by his wife of 58 years, Gloria, are on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Gloria helped Miller with his spotting boards, a key to any football broadcaster, for 37 seasons. Also enshrined are his headsets in the Hall of Fame’s archive section. In 2002, the Chautauqua Hall of Fame also inducted Miller, the sixth hall of fame to offer the announcer membership.

Never forgetting his hometown, Miller continues to give back to his alma mater, donating scholarship funds to Dunkirk High School students each year. On June 17, the Van Miller Golf Tournament tees off at Shorewood Country Club for the third time. Proceeds from the event go toward the Van Miller Hometown Hero Scholarship award which honors two worthy Dunkirk seniors, each receiving a $2,000 college scholarship.

“Van has never forgotten his roots here,” said Stephanie Pulvino, special events planner at Lake Shore Savings Bank and planner for the golf tournament. “When he would fly over Dunkirk in the Bills’ plane, he would always tell stories about Dunkirk. At the tournament, he makes sure he talks to every single person on the course.”

For Miller, the tournament marks a coming home – he caddied at the course as a youngster for $3.60 per day.

“Dunkirk means a lot and this tournament means a lot to me,” he said.

There’s little denying the importance Van Miller has meant to Western New York sports fans.