‘The Simpsons’ Made the Best TV Episode About the Super Bowl by Breaking Bills Fans’ Hearts (Some More)

It can’t come as much of a surprise that The Simpsons made the best TV episode ever about the Super Bowl. They also made the best TV episodes ever about space travel, Citizen Kane, labor unions, small town rivalries, youth ice hockey, The Shining, and the humiliation and pain of stepping on a rake. The Simpsons does the dang thing. And back in January of 1992, in the middle of their third season, The Simpsons turned their eye towards the biggest sporting event on the calendar: the Super Bowl. In doing so, they created an episode about sports, yes, but mostly about fathers and daughters, parents and children that belongs in the American canon. They also broke the hearts of every Buffalo Bills fan in the audience. Hello.

The episode, titled “Lisa the Greek” (a play on Jimmy the Greek, the old football gambling “expert” at CBS sports), sees traditional opposites Homer and Lisa finding something they can bond over: Homer likes watching a Sunday’s worth of NFL football, while Lisa proves to be verrrry skilled at predicting who will win. This leads to a period of unusual closeness for Homer and Lisa, as they spend their autumn Sundays together; Lisa observes the players in humane and empathetic ways and guesses correctly about how it will affect their athletic prowess, while Homer makes the bets with bookie Moe and collects his winnings on Monday. For Lisa, it’s blissful fun with her dad; for Homer, it’s fun but also transactional. Lisa is his daughter but also his lucky gambling chip. Marge, of course, can see where this is headed long before either dad nor daughter does, and she warns Homer not to break his little girl’s heart.

This episode obviously spoke to grade-school me even if at the time I didn’t find it all that poignant. (Mostly I was psyched to hear my favorite TV show mention my favorite football team.) But looking back, as a kid who came of age as a sports fan on the couch, next to my dad (or sometimes at the stadium with my dad), watching the Bills build their early-’90s dynasty, watching Lisa find the same kind of bond with Homer makes me nostalgic now. And not just for when the Bills were good. I would clip that week’s football lineup out of the newspaper and try to predict all the winners. I never got them all right; yet another reminder that Lisa Simpson was a standard none of us could reach. But “Lisa the Greek” gets so much right about how important that low-key bonding can feel to a kid.

To the show’s credit, the fault line in the episode doesn’t come because of a bad gambling beat or anything quite so dramatic. Homer simply, thoughtlessly, accepts a weekend invitation with Barney and the guys for the Sunday after the Super Bowl. After all, football season will be over, then. When Lisa gets the news, she’s utterly devastated that “Daddy Daughter Day” means so little to Homer. And in another clever twist comes the emotional climax: Homer begs for forgiveness and then, like the baboon-baboon-baboon he is, he asks her to pick the Super Bowl winner for him. Lisa is so crestfallen, she can no longer trust her own heart. She picks the Washington Redskins to beat the Buffalo Bills in real-life Super Bowl XXVI, but she warns Homer that she might hate him so much that, subconsciously, she wants him to lose. In which case, he’d be better off picking the Bills.

It’s this kind of thing that made the golden age of The Simpsons so great. They’re able to build up to a funny yet genuinely harrowing (a little girl who has lost all love for her jerk of a dad!) climax that hinges on the outcome of the Super Bowl thusly: if the Redskins win, Lisa really does love Homer; if the Bills win, her heart really has gone cold.

We all know how Super Bowl XXVI actually went. In their second of four consecutive Super Bowls, the explosive Bills offense sputtered early against the Redskins D, with Thurman Thomas missing the first play from scrimmage after losing his helmet, a handy metaphor for the Bills’ fortunes if there ever was one. By the time the Bills found their firepower again, they’d fallen in too deep of a hole, having surrendered 292 passing yards and 2 touchdowns to historical footnote QB Mary Rypien. (Jim Kelly actually put up similar numbers for Buffalo, but his 4 interceptions on the day told a different story.) The Bills were Super Bowl losers again, as they would be twice more, en route to infamy.

And to cap it all off, every Bills fan who watched The Simpsons had to sit there and see their team’s chances for victory lined up with Lisa hating Homer forever. And their ultimate defeat enshrined in animation history. (To add a squirt of lemon to the wound, the episode was re-run the next year, with the Dallas Cowboys dubbed over the Redskins, in a dark prophecy of Buffalo’s continued Super Bowl failure.)

So, congratulations, Simpsons fans everywhere. You got a perfect episode of TV and the best Super Bowl-themed episode in history. Just know that every time that episode airs, a Bills fan dies a little inside. …Oh, you’re cool with that? Great. Awesome. Thanks.

Stream "Lisa the Greek"on Simpsons World