Can 2 rocky roads meet at the Super Bowl?

The Detroit Lions and Buffalo Bills are linked in a few ways, none of them particularly pleasant.

The teams are both from Rust Belt cities that have seen once-thriving industries fade and local economies wane. They're prone to treacherous winter weather, which is why Detroit has a dome and Buffalo had to play home games there (twice!) in the last decade because of local snow emergencies.

They're also members of the NFL's saddest club: the 12 teams that haven't won a Super Bowl. Even within that group, which includes five expansion teams, there's an argument that Buffalo and Detroit top the sadness rankings. The Bills are tied with the Minnesota Vikings for the most Super Bowl appearances without a win at four, but Buffalo's came in consecutive years, failure stacked on disappointment and topped with heartbreak. The Lions, meanwhile, despite being one of the NFL's oldest franchises, have never even made a Super Bowl. Until last year's run to the NFC title game, they had won exactly one playoff game since 1958. One!

And yet, they're among the betting favorites to meet in the Super Bowl, only slightly behind a Lions-Kansas City Chiefs matchup. A Lions-Bills Super Bowl in which one franchise escapes from the sadness club? It doesn't compute. The mind is blown.

They have to get there first, of course, a task that continues Sunday afternoon in Detroit when they play each other. The Lions (12-1) want a win to stay on track for the top playoff seed in the NFC. The Bills (10-3) have less urgency but need to demonstrate that they can slow down a high-powered offense after the Los Angeles Rams hung 44 points on them last week in a shootout loss.

But it'll mostly be a showdown of teams with tragic histories and somehow also a possible Super Bowl preview.

What's interesting about the matchup is how differently the franchises have gone about overcoming years - decades, really - of incompetence. The Bills hired a head coach, Sean McDermott, who rebuilt the defense in his early seasons. Then they traded up to draft Josh Allen as a potential franchise quarterback, a guy who was all tools and no polish. Allen has undergone a rare progression: fun but wild in his first seasons before dramatically improving his accuracy while retaining his remarkable play-making ability. This season, with the Bills roster weakened by salary-cap issues and injuries, he's been wearing the Superman cape more often as the MVP favorite.

The Lions are a more complete team, at least until a recent run of defensive injuries, but their key move was trading one of the league's best pure passers (Matthew Stafford) for a system quarterback (Jared Goff). Goff is a former first overall draft pick who was best known for being terrorized by Bill Belichick's defense in Super Bowl LIII, but he's been reborn in Detroit as the pilot of a talented and dangerous offense. Give him good conditions and protection, and he'll pick defenses apart.

No mention of the Lions is complete without a word about Dan Campbell, a former tight end who might be the NFL's first-ever gunslinger head coach. He's the league's most aggressive decision-maker on fourth downs, and last week against the Green Bay Packers, he even went for it late while the Lions were in position for a makable go-ahead field goal. (They converted and were able to end the game without giving the ball back to the Packers.)

That aggressiveness can also backfire, as it did in the NFC Championship Game last year when a couple of attempts to snuff out San Francisco with fourth-down gambles instead allowed the 49ers to overcome a 17-point deficit.

It's felt like the Lions will go as far as Campbell's style will take them. He's the furthest thing from an analytics nerd, but he repeatedly makes the kind of game-management calls that the nerds embrace. Can he get through an entire postseason without the firecracker going off in his hand? We shall see.

The Bills have their own question marks. McDermott owns one of the biggest game-management disasters in playoff history, the "13 seconds" loss to the Chiefs, so fans can't be entirely confident that he'd make the right calls at crucial moments. And more ominously, there's the question of whether Allen can continue doing so much on his own.

Sunday's game against the Rams was the best and worst of the Bills. Los Angeles ran and passed all over them. If there was some other way to advance the ball down the field, the Bills would have struggled to stop that, too. Allen threw for three touchdowns, ran for three more, and still lost. Having your quarterback run around and bail you out with a ridiculous play isn't generally a formula for playoff success. (Although, it has worked for Kansas City.)

But those questions, for the Lions and Bills, can be answered later. For now, there should be a very fun game to watch. Their fan bases deserve that much.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.