KANSAS CITY - Once again, Buffalo, the perpetual pit of despair when it comes to soul-crushing, gut-ripping, tear-inducing sporting defeats, must add a new descriptor to its regional lexicon.

Roll call, please.

There is Wide Right, there’s No Goal, and there’s the Music City Miracle.

So now, the assignment is this: Figure out what to call Sunday night’s stunning, sickening, sledgehammer to the head 42-36 overtime loss by the Buffalo Bills to the Kansas City Chiefs, another end result that will haunt an already haunted fan base for eternity.

The early returns seem to be that this one should be called “13 seconds.” Makes sense given that 13 is considered an unlucky number, and that was the amount of time the Bills used to turn what would have been one of the greatest victories in franchise history into, well, a game where we’re trying to come up with a nickname.

Thirteen seconds. Thirteen friggin’ seconds and two way-too-easy plays is all Patrick Mahomes needed to move the ball 44 yards to position Harrison Butker for a game-tying 49-yard field goal as time expired in the fourth quarter.

The moon has set and the sun has risen and still, I can’t believe the Bills allowed it to happen.

They were 13 seconds away from hosting the AFC Championship Game with a chance to go to the Super Bowl, a championship game and a Super Bowl, both of which they would have been favored to win.

And inexplicably, impossibly, they couldn’t do it.

The moment the coin flip went Kansas City’s way to start overtime, Bills fans may as well have just turned off their TVs because you knew what was going to happen.

Buffalo, man. A town that could strain the supply chain for Advil, and still, the pain never ceases.

“We just ended up on the wrong side of maybe one of the greatest games in postseason history,” said center Mitch Morse, who makes his offseason home in the Kansas City area and will be reminded constantly of what happened. “Devastated in that locker room. Very proud of our guys, but that last two minutes of football was something special. Can’t write it in movies, it was remarkable. I was honored to be a part of it.”

Nothing he said was incorrect. However, there’s a big difference between winning one of the greatest postseason games in history, and losing it, and sadly, the Bills were on the wrong side of that history.

Sean McDermott refused to answer questions pertaining to those final, fateful, faulty 13 seconds.

“I don’t want to really get into specifics,” he said. “Just overall, there’s things we talked about and we can just execute better and that starts with me and goes all the way down. I’m really proud of the guys and their effort. Obviously they made a couple plays down the stretch, so I’ll just leave it at that right now.”

Josh Allen was simply phenomenal

Let’s take a timeout here before the gory recalling of those 13 seconds to acknowledge the otherworldly game Josh Allen played. If you take nothing else from this horror show, take this: The Bills have themselves one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, exactly the type of generational talent you need to compete for the ultimate trophy in this league.

For more than two decades the Bills were without that quarterback and, to no one’s surprise, they endured a 17-year playoff drought. They have that guy now, and he is a thing to behold.

The drives he put together in the fourth quarter, both of which deserved to be game-winners, were a testament to every fiber of greatness in his 6-foot-5, 240-pound body. You just shake your head in disbelief that Allen had to walk off the field the beaten quarterback.

Bills vs. Chiefs: Patrick Mahomes stopped celebrating win to run across the field and hug Josh Allen

But he did, because of what took place after his fourth touchdown pass of the night to Gabriel Davis with 13 seconds to go which gave the Bills, you would have thought, a 36-33 victory.

“It’s disappointing right now. It hurts right now,” Allen said. “You can say it’s going to be better, we’re going to learn from this and it’s very cliché and nobody wants to hear that. But I truly believe that this unit will learn from this. We’ve got a pretty young squad. A lot of guys coming back next year. We’ve just got to use this as fuel for the fire.”

Again, you just shake your head once you lift your chin off your chest.

Now, on to the debacle that was the final 13 seconds.

13 seconds: Should the Buffalo Bills have squib kicked?

This has been a hotly-contested debate, but on this point, I think McDermott made the right call, sort of. The problem with the squib is that it can also go awry.

Tyler Bass might doink it off one of the Chiefs players way up the field and assuming they recover, they’d have great field position. More likely, if the squib kick gets downfield, the Chiefs were probably instructed to field it and take an immediate knee to save the time, so it probably wasn’t worth the risk.

What they should have done is have Bass kick off high and down to around the 5-yard-line, forcing deep man Byron Pringle to catch it and return it against the full army of Bills coverage men. Then all you have to do is make a tackle, the Chiefs lose maybe 5-6 seconds, and they have virtually no chance of getting into field goal range.

Instead, Bass kicked it out of the end zone to prevent the risk of disaster and McDermott’s thinking was this: He has what was allegedly the No. 1 defense in the NFL - No. 1 in points, total yards, and passing yards. For as great as Mahomes is, there were 13 friggin’ seconds to go, so just play defense and you win.

“Yeah, we talked about a lot of things,” McDermott said when asked about the kickoff decision. “I’m just gonna leave it at the execution and that starts with me.”

Why did the Buffalo Bills sit back in coverage?

OK, so the touchback put the ball at the 25. No problem, right? So many options here on how to play it, but for some reason, a very smart defensive coordinator, Leslie Frazier, chose the absolute worst option by playing soft.

On first down, the Bills had four men rushing Mahomes, they had five defenders in a shell with corners Dane Jackson and Levi Wallace 10 yards off the line at the 35, Matt Milano, Tremaine Edmunds and Taron Johnson back around the 40, and Jordan Poyer and Micah Hyde way back, 30 yards downfield at the Bills 45.

Why? Why not play your normal defense and cover the Chiefs five men in the pattern with your seven men? The Bills almost never give up the deep ball, so that should not have been a major concern, especially with Poyer and Hyde sitting back in deep center field.

And the Chiefs aren’t a big deep downfield throwing team. They kill you with short and intermediate passes and then their receivers use their Olympic sprinter speed to make massive yards after the catch.

Mahomes threw a quick pass to Tyreek Hill and bang, he had 19 yards in the blink of an eye, or in this case, five seconds.

Now it’s first down at the KC 44, eight seconds to go and the Chiefs were 20 yards from Butker’s range. And the Bills did almost the same thing.

This time they had five defenders within 12 yards of the line with Poyer and Hyde deep again. Kelce was lined up to the left and what happened next just makes you scream. Wallace and Milano let Kelce run straight ahead 15 yards as if he was invisible and Mahomes fired the pass and the gain wound up being 25 of the easiest yards you could ever imagine.

Wallace, for some reason, looked like he was guarding the outside when that didn’t matter because the Chiefs had a timeout and didn’t need a sideline completion. Milano, I don’t know what he was thinking. You’ve got Kelce, the best tight end in the league, running right past you and he was late to react. It was just an egregious mess.

Kelce made it to the 31, Mahomes called for the timeout with three seconds left, and Butker drilled the 49-yard tying kick.

“We had to go out there and make a stop; weren’t able to do it,” Poyer said. “It’s just a tough feeling, hard to put in words. It sucks. It’s something we’ve got to live with, something we’re going to have to learn from.”

Buffalo Bills defense was complete no-show in overtime

The coin went up, it came down, the Bills called it wrong for the second time in the game, and if anyone really thought the Bills were going to stop the Chiefs from scoring the game-ending TD and thus denying Allen a possession, then clearly you haven’t been a Bills fan for long.

This series of plays was just absurdly bad for the Bills defense which, after all the good work it did during the season, left open the debate that its numbers were a little tainted because of the parade of bad quarterbacks and bad offenses it faced along the way.

They had just failed in stunning high-definition in 13 seconds, and then it was as if they weren’t even on the field in the scant 4:15 it took to finish overtime when Mahomes effortlessly moved the Chiefs 75 yards in eight plays to his game-winning TD pass to Kelce, who beat Milano again.

“We’re all sick to our stomach and it hurts. We work really hard to get here,” McDermott said. “I know the fans are disappointed, and I wish I could take that off of them. I wish I could take it off of the team, but we can’t and, you know, what doesn’t kill you should only make you stronger, and I think this should make us stronger. It’s going to take some time, but it should make us stronger.”

Sal Maiorana can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Did Buffalo Bills earn new nickname in gut-wrenching loss to Chiefs?