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"My understanding is we don't get to say anything," says Paul Maguire, who always has something to say. "What I wanted to say is: 'We won championships in 1964 and 1965 – and now it's about time that you guys picked it up.' "

Maguire, 86, lets out a long laugh. He was the punter and a reserve linebacker on those AFL champs of 1964 and '65, both against the San Diego Chargers, his former team. And he has a story about the Bills locker room in the moments before that 1964 title game at War Memorial Stadium.

Time was drawing short before kickoff. The Bills sat nervously in their cramped quarters. Fullback Cookie Gilchrist was yelling at coach Lou Saban to get things moving.

"So Lou jumps up on the table where we used to play pinochle," Maguire says. "And he says: 'I only have one thing to say to you: Heads down, toes up!' "

The room was silent for a second.

"And then – pardon me – but Cookie says, 'What the (blank) does that mean?' " Maguire says. "And Saban says, 'How the hell do I know? I'm as nervous as you are.' "

With that, the Bills ran out of their locker room just as the Chargers were leaving theirs – "and we were laughing our (behinds) off," Maguire says. Chargers tight end Dave Kocourek, Maguire's close friend, asked him if the Bills really thought it was going to be that easy.

"I told him, 'David, you have no idea,' " Maguire says.

The Bills quickly got behind 7-0, and the Chargers were driving again when Bills linebacker Mike Stratton flattened Chargers halfback Keith Lincoln with what is known in Bills lore as the Hit Heard Round the World. Lincoln was down for several minutes.

Toes up.

"I never found out if Lou did it on purpose to get us loose," Maguire says of the puzzling pep talk. "I don't think so, but knowing him, maybe he did. Every time I asked, he just got that grin on his face."

The Bills won that game 20-7. The next season, in San Diego, they won a second consecutive AFL championship, this time 23-0. They led 7-0 when Butch Byrd returned a punt 74 yards for the touchdown that broke it open. Maguire took out two Chargers with one block – Kocourek and quarterback/punter John Hadl.

"They were two of my best friends," Maguire says. "That was the first time they called me a (SOB)."

Maguire and Byrd no doubt will reminisce about all of that this weekend.

"Butch is the only one coming in from out of town, as far as I know," Maguire says. "The rest of us are here. Wray Carlton, Eddie Rutkowski and Booker Edgerson live here, and I live here in the summertime. Where else would you rather be?"

Maguire means Hamburg, not far from Wanakah Country Club.

"I lose a lot of golf balls there," he says.

He lives four months a year in Hamburg and eight in Charleston, S.C., where he played college football for The Citadel. He got recruited to play there from his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, by Al Davis – the man who would go on to be a major force in the AFL with the Oakland Raiders. Maguire would go on to be one of only 20 players who played in the AFL for all of its 10 seasons.

His 11th pro season, in 1970, was the Bills' first in the NFL. After he retired from playing football, Maguire spent 43 years broadcasting it. He was on the ABC team that covered the so-called Music City Miracle playoff game, when the Tennessee Titans beat the Bills on a trick play on a kickoff in the closing seconds. Was it really a lateral? Or an illegal forward pass?

"Forward pass," Maguire says. "By a yard. But who's counting?"

He and his wife, Beverly, married in 1962. "That's 63 years of wedded bliss for me – and two for her," he says. "She gets an hour here and an hour there, and it adds up."

What will it mean to him to be on the field on Sunday?

"I have four grandsons, and they're all going to be here," he says. "My whole family is going to be here. We're flying them all in. There will be 14 of us. I bought them all Maguire jerseys."

His old teammates are like family, too.

"We were so close," he says of those title teams. "Every Tuesday night we had a team party downtown. It was a day after we had seen the film, and we talked it over and chewed out guys' (behinds) who'd had a bad day. We were a team that was so together. Everyone respected the hell out of each other. And you know the one who really brought us all together? It was Jack Kemp. Jack had the respect of everyone. We had one goal, and that was the championship, and we won it twice.

"I remember everything about those games. I think about them a lot. This just brings back great memories of great people and the friends we made, on and off the field. They talk about the Mafia now, but you take a look at the fans we had in the 1960s. That place was filled all the time. The fans in Buffalo, I don't know anyone who is better than these guys, men and women. It's just a wonderful place to play football."

Here's some friendly advice for these Bills of yore when the cheers wash over them on Sunday afternoon at Highmark Stadium:

Heads up, toes down.

We will take a look back at the 1964 Bills in this space periodically throughout the 2024 season.