The Bills get better, the rest of the AFC stumbles. But let’s keep it cool.

“Bills attempting to keep 2-0 start in perspective,” read the headline on the Bills Notebook in Tuesday’s Buffalo News.

Maintaining a somewhat detached viewpoint is great when it comes to daily fluctuations in the stock market and presidential race, or whether a casino gets built in downtown Buffalo, or the daily symphony of door-slamming at the neighbor’s house that wakes you each morning.

Much of football’s joy, though, stems from careening between high and low with each victory or defeat. But not for the players, apparently.

Take the following quote from Trent Edwards, who directed the Bills to 10 fourth-quarter points and a 20-16 win in the smothering heat of Jacksonville on Sunday.

“Encouraged is a good way to describe the feeling but for me personally I still feel like we have a lot to prove,” News sports reporter Mike Harrington quotes Edwards as saying a day after the biggest victory of his nascent career. “It’s Week Two. It’s nothing monumental, nothing that we should be getting overly excited about.”

Surprisingly, Edwards did not invoke any permutation of the phrase “one game at a time,” an oversight which may draw a fine from the league office. Still, his humble tone surely pleased Bills coach Dick Jauron and the rest of team management, since it neither offered inspiration to this week’s opponent, the Oakland Raiders, nor provided potential fodder to talk-show hosts or wise-guy columnists should Buffalo falter from here on.

But wouldn’t it have been more interesting had Edwards said something like this?

“Man, we were just toying with them—we only kept it close to give it a little dramatic flavor. We could have put those chumps away any time we wanted. Who cares about 2-0? We’re going for 16-0. Oakland, you’d better duck.”

Of course, those who make a living playing and coaching professional football don’t speak that way, with rare and quickly vilified exceptions. Instead, they predictably talk about the importance of approaching each game as an entity unto itself, refusing to contemplate the weeks and months ahead.

That approach keeps the chances for embarrassment at a minimum, which, let’s face it, has become the ultimate goal of just about every football type who speaks into a microphone held by someone else.

Fortunately, fans and media types—whose existence revolves around blowing things out of proportion—are not bound by such strictures.

Not when the local team produces the sort of performance that Buffalo did in Jacksonville last Sunday, staging a fourth-quarter rally to beat a perennial playoff team widely expected to contend for a Super Bowl berth this time around.

Not that the several score fans gathered on the third floor of Cole’s—this week’s Season Ticket vantage point—took anything for granted, with most tensely awaiting the disastrous conclusion to which they have grown accustomed right up until Jacksonville’s last offensive play ended with the ball in the clutch of Buffalo cornerback Jabari Greer.

Even then, the reaction was more exhale than exultation. With the most imposing game on the first half of the 2008 schedule safely in the win column, though, there should be plenty of chances to whoop.

Buffalo’s victory resulted from the most comprehensive performance by the Bills in a road game against a top team this century.

The rebuilt and rejuvenated defense exploited a depleted offensive line.

The Bills pounded away at a stout Jaguars defense, scratching out enough on the ground to retain offensive balance.

And Trent Edwards delivered a virtuoso performance, capped by perfect throws on the game’s two biggest plays, a 37-yard strike to Lee Evans that set up a seven-yard touchdown flip to James Hardy with 4:10 remaining in the fourth quarter.

Despite Buffalo’s 34-10 pasting of Seattle in the season opener, it took a while for the crowd at Cole’s, which had gathered for Brofest, an at-least-annual congregation organized by Mark, a frequent Season Ticket contributor whose penchant for addressing just about every man, woman, or child as “bro” gives the gathering its name, to buy in.

Given recent Bills history, it did seem like a perfect set-up for a let-down. In 2005, Buffalo opened with a fairly impressive win at home behind a second-year quarterback in his first season as the starter before venturing to Florida for the first road test of the year.

J.P. Losman and that team failed miserably. He got yanked by Mike Mularkey late in a 19-3 loss to Tampa Bay, the first low point of a season rife with them.

Pre-game technical difficulties seemed like a bad omen. For some reason, the audio-visual club attempted to tweak the already-fine picture on the various screens around the room, briefly losing it entirely. Reception was quickly restored, though, and the low hum of conversation around the room soon drowned out CBS commentators Gus Johnson and Steve Tasker, making for an ideal viewing experience.

Edwards immediately eradicated any fear he might pull a Losman, completing passes on four of Buffalo’s first six plays and six straight on an 11-play, 82-yard drive. By the time Marshawn Lynch juked and jumped 11 yards for the game’s first points, nearly half the first quarter was gone.

If the Bills were in danger of losing that all-important perspective after their early success, Jacksonville kept their heads in the game by keeping it close through the first half, then staging a long touchdown drive of its own in the third quarter and taking the lead after pulling a rather Rovian maneuver.

Faced with kicking off to Buffalo’s Terrence McGee, who along with Roscoe Parrish gives the Bills the National Football League’s most dangerous return tandem, the Jaguars instead used their opponents’ strength against them by staging a surprise onside kick.

It worked, and Jacksonville converted on Buffalo’s forced error with a field goal to take the lead. Then rookie Quentin Groves swept past Bills offensive tackle Jason Peters, fresh off the hold-out that kept him out of training camp and the win over the Seahawks, to sack Edwards and strip him of the ball, setting up another field goal and a 16-10 lead for the Jaguars early in the fourth quarter.

“Here we go,” came a voice from one of the white-clothed tables, which Mark had liberally papered with copies of the September 4 Artvoice carrying an article headlined “Council of Trent,” after the Edwards-inspired T-shirts he had produced and given to many of the attendees. “Same old Bills.”

Hardly.

After a Buffalo drive stalled at midfield, the defense quickly got the ball back. On third-and-six from Jacksonville’s 44-yard line, offensive coordinator Turk Schonert eschewed a safe play call geared to pick up only the yardage needed to keep the drive going, calling for the deep ball to Evans.

Then Edwards threaded one to the six-foot-five Hardy, who was drafted in the second round for just such occasions, in the back of the end zone.

Buffalo’s defense, invigorated by the touchdown, yielded a total of zero yards on Jacksonville’s final five offensive plays, which were sandwiched around a 45-yard Rian Lindell field goal that pushed the final margin to 20-16.

While the Bills soon turned their attention to maintaining their perspective, the 0-2 Jaguars, a chic pick to represent the American Football Conference in this year’s Super Bowl, set about losing theirs.

“Jags desperate after loss to Bills,” read the next-day headline on jaguars.com, the team’s official Web site.