‘Over There, They’re Playing a Real Game--Life or Death,’ Says Player : Football: Conflict puts Raiders-Bills game in perspective. Fans and players show appreciation toward troops overseas.

The way Tom Tornabene had it figured, it was not just a football game that he showed up for Sunday, his ticket in his hand and the flagpole from his front porch tipped back on his shoulder like an M-16.

This most American of pageants stood for something. Defiance, maybe. Resolve. Patriotism, even. Like poking a stick in Saddam Hussein’s eye.

“I have family over there,” said the 26-year-old meat worker. “I know my family. They still want things to go on, somber as it is. I don’t think it’d be right to let this guy think he can hold up everything just because he’s a nut case.”

In the van on the drive here, the guys’ talk was not what it had been on all the Sundays before, said Tornabene, “the traditional what the points are, who’s gonna get the sacks. We talked about the bombings and stuff.”

For the 80,324 fans who came unhesitatingly to Rich Stadium for the Los Angeles Raiders-Buffalo Bills game--one of the first national gatherings since bombings started in the Persian Gulf--the event took on the mood of a second front.

Even dispirited Raiders guard Steve Wisniewski, mindful of his brother the fighter pilot on duty in the gulf, agreed afterward that if the coalition could shellac Iraq the way the Bills had, by a 51-3 margin, “that’d be great.”

“You definitely put it in the scope of things,” said Wisniewski. “We’re playing a game here, even though it is our business. Over there, they’re playing a real game--life or death.”

This war, in the spitting snow on 100 yards of sea-green field, shared some of the glossary of the far-off war in the sand. Blitz. Bomb. Hit behind the line.

From the national anthem--which even the hot dog vendors sang--to the blowout finish, the Bills’ colors and the nation’s--red white and blue for both--pooled indistinguishably.

By halftime, Frank Rokitka was stomping through the tunnels behind his friend with the sign. It read: “Our U.S. Soldiers are the real champions.”

“It does bother me”--fun here and war there, all at the same time, Rokitka said. But coming here “is the only thing I can do to keep my mind off it. When I sit in front of the TV, I get scared. I could go, too.”

The road to Rich Stadium passes the Ford Motor plant, Bethlehem Steel, Independent Cement Corp.--the stolid stars of the industrial firmament--in the kind of town that has always sent its own to the front lines as readily as to the factory gates.

Lest the rest of the world thinks Buffalo fans were heedlessly taking their frivolous pleasure in sport, the city has been at pains to show otherwise. Locals were exhorted to bring flags to the stadium. A pizza chain gave them away free. Over in tunnel A-8, usher Pat Lewis pointed to the upper deck. “They had a flag so big there they had to take it down. It was blocking everybody’s view.”

Beer bellies strained at the fabric of desert camouflage gear on fans who hoisted their flags above their heads. Skinny boys with cans of beer unfurled a quilt-sized flag in front of a TV camera--backward. A man tucked his like a dinner napkin into the neck of his blue parka. A woman jabbed hers into her lacquered hairdo.

The U.S. Military Academy band from West Point had already planned on playing at halftime before this gulf business. But you would have thought that they were out on the front lines, not on the hash marks, the way fans were slapping them on the back, high-fiving them in the popcorn line.

“They’d told us to be careful about where we went and what we did,” said percussionist Master Sgt. Dave Smith. “Nobody expected the reception we got.”

That was it, of course. Being careful. Terrorists can read the sports pages, too; can rent the film “Black Sunday.”

About twice as many sheriff’s deputies and dogs were called out. Airspace was closed. Fans’ cameras were banned. Authorities hemmed and hawed and finally allowed in some radios and portable TVs, but they snipped the flags off any flagpoles bigger than an arrow.

Sheltered in a rented truck across the street, Dane Gallivan was drinking beer and shelling peanuts. On the side of the truck, picked out in paint and silver duct tape, hung the sign: “God Bless America, Let’s Go Buffalos.”

Flying here from Phoenix, Gallivan had seen four servicemen. “I bought ‘em all a drink, because I knew they were heading for something a lot tougher than I was.”

So he can hardly talk about being afraid, right? “I don’t feel we should be held hostage by (Hussein). If they hit us on our turf, they’ll be hurting.”

Besides, “it’s too cold” for terrorists, said his friend, Lee Ormsby, 35. Still, “it’s a lot more somber here than last week. Not so wild.”

The man who stood his post outside throughout the game was Ron Smith, 41. He had no ticket. He does have a son in the Army in Germany.

He made sure beforehand that it would be OK for him to stand here, wearing his son’s camouflage jacket and the gas mask he bought for $35 this week. In his hand a borrowed flag; beside him a corkboard, lettered in yellow: “America for peace . . . all of America sends our love and support for those in harm’s way.”

Some figured him for a protester--”Support the troops, dude!” one man howled at him--but here is what Smith wanted from his vigil:

“I’d just like the entire crowd to enjoy the game but reflect too that we have loved ones over there.”

No incongruities, no ironies troubled Judy Alfrets. She watched the game from home, in suburban Hamburg, on a street where, in the week the first Americans became missing in the gulf, neighbors have set up tombstones naming all the teams the Bills have beaten. A cardboard coffin promised “Raiders’ funeral 12:30 Sunday.”

Her son, Chris Massari, 23, is a Marine in the gulf, a Buffalo native for whom all the blandishments of being based in San Diego have not deflected his loyalties.

She mailed him a Bills’ shirt and socks, and every time he wears them, the Bills win. “The guys in my unit make fun of me,” he wrote, “but I wear ‘em.”

“It’s the one thing that keeps me going through all this war business,” she said, “that the Bills have had such a great season. I just feel like they’re doing it for my son.”

Since the games began, she has given it much thought, and in the last few days especially, with everybody wondering whether it somehow was not fitting to play football and wage war at the same time.

“Even if my son was injured or killed, knowing how important it is to him--I’d still want it to go on.”