With 2023 coming to a close, Sports Spectrum is highlighting our most-viewed stories of the year.
When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed and fought for his life on the field during a Monday night game Jan. 2, prayers were offered up from not just the NFL world, but from all over the world. Now nearly a year later, we can praise God for saving Hamlin’s life and allowing him to return this season to the Bills.
That nearly-tragic event impacted many people, but none more so than Hamlin’s teammates. After their game against Cincinnati was canceled due to Hamlin’s condition, the Bills returned to Buffalo and prepared to face New England that following Sunday. And when that game incredibly began with a 96-yard kick-return touchdown for the Bills, quarterback Josh Allen could only describe the remarkable day as “spiritual.”
“I was just going around to my teammates saying, ‘God’s real.’ You can’t draw that one up, write that one up any better,” he said in his postgame press conference.
Later in the week, Allen opened up a little bit about his faith when talking to NFL media personality Kyle Brandt.
“I’ve never been struck like that before from a play, from an experience, from an emotion, it’s never hit me that way before,” Allen said on “Kyle Brandt’s Basement.” “And look, I’ll be the first to admit, I haven’t been the most devoted Christ-follower in my life, and I’ve had my different beliefs and thoughts and ideas and stuff like that, but something got hold of me there, and it was extremely powerful, [something] that I couldn’t deny.”
When we published a story Jan. 13 about Allen describing a “spiritual awakening,” the very next day we saw the largest single-day traffic spike of the entire year. By a wide margin, this ranks No. 1 among our most-viewed stories in 2023:
>> Bills QB Josh Allen describes his ‘spiritual awakening’ in events surrounding Damar Hamlin <<
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