Fans Follow Their Teams to Bitter--or Sweet--End : Football: In true Super Bowl tradition, the county’s Dallas and Buffalo devotees flock to be with their fellow followers.

By time-honored custom, Mark Epperson rose early Sunday morning, donning his team uniform: a straw, stiff-brimmed, white cowpoke’s hat, a Marlboro man T-shirt and butter-yellow lizard boots with pointy toes as sharp as the Dallas native’s attitude.

By time-honored custom, Joe Brown rose early Sunday morning, donning his team uniform: a lucky dollar bill, a duck-billed cap and a pair of lucky shorts worn so frequently that in deference to humanity he accessorized his attire with a peeled clove of garlic stuffed in his sweat pants pocket. On Sunday, the two McDonnell Douglas mechanics sped north and south on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach in search of team spirit and its usual companions, cold draft beer and wide-screen TV.

The wide boulevard was something of a reverse Mason-Dixon line with Dallas Cowboy fans like Epperson seeking Texas-style solidarity in the cool, dark quarters of Denim & Diamonds in north Huntington Beach. Some 100 loyal and long-suffering Buffalo Bills fans headed south to the flat, tiled quarters of Buffalo Wings N Things, where they tasted medium spicy, deep-fried wings and--once again--that bitter tang of defeat.

In tribute to the game, Denim & Diamonds silenced the boots of two-stepping and line-dancing cowboys so that sports fans could watch their heroes with complete and utter concentration.

Epperson, of Huntington Beach, leaped so many times from his table during the game that finally one of the restaurant’s smiling managers pleaded for calm.

“They’re America’s team,” Epperson explained his unswerving loyalty. “They’re a working class, blue-collar team, and I come from a working-class family.”

Perhaps because they’ve learned to struggle with so many losses, the Bills fans were even more exuberant than the Cowboys’. They wore their heart on their sleeves--and their sweats, sneakers, earrings and hairbows. Not to mention their unmentionables.

The night before the game, hard-core members of the Southern California Buffalo Boosters swept through the Buffalo Wings restaurant, decorating the wood rafters with helium-filled red and blue balloons and grainy banners spit out by computers that spelled out their wistful sentiments: “We Billieve.” “We’re back . . . Deal with it America.”

During those sweet, fleeting moments when the Bills were ahead, superstitious fans rose from their seats, reverently touching a stuffed football doll like a holy water font. One man seized a fake head of a horned buffalo, parading among the tables that faced a huge, wide-screen television with flickering images of their beloved Bills.

For the past four years, Jim Perry has been coming religiously to this shopping strip haven for upstate New Yorkers who ride out their occasional defeats on the wings of chickens.

“I guess I have a little different attitude about this,” said Perry, whose lucky charm strategy of avoiding the washing machine for four weeks apparently had failed the team. “At least we got to the Super Bowl. I’m just glad to be in it. Being a Bills fan is more than rooting for a football team. It’s part of my family, the city where I came from.”

“I’ve lived here five years now,” added his tablemate, Brown, 28, whose lucky dollar bill lay near the amber drippings of his beer. “And I’ve never changed team allegiances. That’s my only team.”

As the game progressed and the pile of cold, gnawed chicken wings grew, some fans became philosophical, remembering the sting of past defeats.

“We’ve got to support the Bills and show them our love,” said Patti Myers, a Buffalo native and booster who helped organize the party of New Yorkers. “These people from Buffalo are such a close group. Every time they’ve lost they go into a deep depression.”