Weeks After Damar Hamlin’s Collapse, the Bills and Bengals Play Again

Three weeks after Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field during a game in Cincinnati, the Bills and Bengals meet again today in the divisional round of the N.F.L. playoffs, at 3 p.m. in Orchard Park, N.Y.

The last time the two teams were on the field together, on Jan. 2, Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest after making what appeared to be a routine tackle of receiver Tee Higgins. Hamlin stood up after the play but then collapsed to the turf. Medical personnel administered CPR and restarted Hamlin’s heart before taking him off the field in an ambulance, as players and coaches looked on in anguish.

Since then, Hamlin, 24, has made steady progress. He was released from a hospital in Buffalo on Jan. 11 and visited the Bills for the first time last weekend in advance of their wild-card playoff game against the Miami Dolphins. Coach Sean McDermott said last week that Hamlin had been at the team facility “almost daily.”

“That experience, we’ll carry that with us,” McDermott said at a news conference. “There’s a challenge to that, but there’s also a lot of good that came from that. And I think right now we need to focus on the positive, and the positives that came out of that, as opposed to the other piece of it.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/sports/football/damar-hamlin-bills-bengals.html