The Chiefs might have needed a loss like this

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. - Sometimes a little losing is good. The Kansas City Chiefs needed to smolder a little bit, needed a loss like the one the Buffalo Bills gave them Sunday, needed to leave the field tight-jawed and dumb with disappointment, and maybe a little startled. All the marvel they perpetrated in their 9-0 start, the myriad ways they found to walk off as winners, had glossed over weaknesses and killed their appetite for outright domination.

It took so long before the Chiefs grew arrogant, two straight Super Bowl titles and 15 wins in a row dating from last Christmas. Winning can bring a dead halt to your learning and make you risk averse, yet the Chiefs never grew predictable, only all the more watchable. Seven of their nine victories this season were by one score, and you - and, more importantly, they - simply assumed they would do it again. But the Bills’ Josh Allen preempted them, went galloping like a Galahad to the end zone with 2:17 left, to finally turn the tables, 30-21.

That sent the Chiefs back home to ponder the next phase of this season and how to address their exposed problems, which mainly consist of “just finding ways to win by not one score,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said. Their hope is that the loss provides them with a little gunpowder - in which case the Bills will have done the Chiefs a favor, and nobody in the rest of the NFL will thank them for that in the end.

“I mean, you don’t know. I’m hoping that it is a benefit,” Mahomes said.

If you jabbed Chiefs Coach Andy Reid with sodium pentothal, he might just confess under the effects of the truth serum that he didn’t mind taking a loss like this, against a conference rival they have lost to in four straight regular season meetings now only to beat them in three consecutive postseason games. This was a crucial if uninviting test, in a dowdy but hostile old stadium with fans clad in fur pelts beating on the balustrades, under a chilly dishwater sky in which the sun didn’t go down so much as it descended into a murk of clouds and coal smoke. In such an environment, against such a quality opponent, “Your ‘A’ game better be on, or you’ll get smacked around a little bit,” Reid warned in midweek during a conversation with retired quarterback Alex Smith on SiriusXM NFL Radio.

The Chiefs haven’t summoned their “A” game yet. Coming to Buffalo, Mahomes had thrown for fewer yards to this point than in any previous season, and their collective margin of victory over their nine opponents was just 58 points. Mahomes opened this one with an interception and a third-down sack on their first two possessions. Yet they had kept making great escapes and finding ways, and that bred a certain belief that they knew something about winning that other teams didn’t. “More than anything, it was a confidence that we were going to make it happen at the end of games,” Mahomes observed.

Title-defending is one of the hardest things to do in sports, the physical and emotional equivalent of fighting an undertow, a drag against invisible opponents such as satiated boredom, self-congratulation, challenge fatigue and the weariness of taking every team’s best and most hyped shot. There is an “I shot Jesse James” syndrome. The Chiefs’ task has been made even harder by many key injuries, including to clutch kicker Harrison Butker, and they’ve had to duct-tape together their wide receivers unit with Marquise Brown and Rashee Rice out. Still, Reid managed to keep their heads on straight and their eyes front, and he made the undefeated pursuit seem enjoyable but not critical.

“You bust your butt and you maximize all you can do with the time that you have to get better and to know the information that’s in front of you,” Reid told Smith. “And so then you don’t have to worry about all that other stuff. You maximize it out and you get to a point where you go: ‘All right, this is as much as I can do. I’m just going to go out and do it.’ And so it relieves some of that, ‘Oh, we’re 9-0; we’re you know whatever - three Super Bowls,’ all that crap. You got to do the work to get the result, and sometimes that doesn’t happen. … So why worry about all that? That’s stuff you can’t control. The thing you control is what I’m talking about here. It’s kind of a neat thing to watch, and that’s what the guys have been doing. And we’ll see. We’ll just see how it goes. I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball, and nobody does, really.”

There was something resigned and accepting in the Chiefs afterward, a recognition that this was a good diagnostic. It wasn’t the most critical game of the season; it was merely the most eye-catching - and a fascinating battle between Mahomes and Allen. When Mahomes hit Noah Gray with one of his typical lancing cross-body throws to trail by just two with 7:53 left, a 10th victory seemed wholly possible, if not probable - only for the possibility to dissolve on that dodging, vaulting run from Allen.

“A play here or there, that’s kind of the difference of these games that we’re playing,” Mahomes said. “You can use it as fuel. Nothing to hang your head on, losing to them. … The undefeated thing was cool but not our ultimate goal.”