Buffalo opened the new Highmark Stadium the way a franchise dreams of opening a new Highmark Stadium: Josh Allen accounted for five touchdowns, the Bills handled Detroit, and Buffalo walked out of the first game ever played in that building at 2-0. First impressions in a new house are usually awkward. This one was a housewarming.

I don't have the full box score in front of me yet, so I'm not going to pretend I can walk you through every drive. What I can tell you is the number that matters and the reason it matters. Five touchdowns. From the guy who has been carrying that offense on his back for the better part of a decade, on the night the organization moved out of the only home most of its fans have ever known.

What happened in the Bills new Highmark Stadium debut

The Bills spent generations in the old barn in Orchard Park, a building that opened in 1973 and never once tried to be comfortable. Wind, snow, concrete, folding chairs in the parking lot. It was beloved precisely because it was miserable. Replacing it was always going to feel a little like moving your grandmother's furniture out of the house.

Then Allen went and hung five on Detroit in the first game inside the new place, and the eulogy turned into a ribbon cutting in about three hours.

That's the part I keep circling. Stadium openers are usually strange, slightly hollow events. The crowd is figuring out where the bathrooms are. The team plays tight. Buffalo skipped all of it.

Why Josh Allen's five-touchdown night mattered

Allen is the reigning face of this thing. He has already won a league MVP, he has already dragged Buffalo through January in conditions that would ground commercial flights, and he is the one player whose career spans the last chapter of the old stadium and the first page of this one. Giving him the keys to the debut was the obvious call. He answered it with five scores.

Understand what that does for a fan base that has been told for years that the new building would cost them something. The tailgates, the character, the ghosts. One night doesn't settle that argument. But it starts the new place with a memory instead of a grievance, and that is worth more than any amenity in the concourse.

from the almanac: the old place gave Buffalo the greatest comeback in NFL history, january 3, 1993, down 35-3 to houston in the wild card round and winning 41-38 in overtime with frank reich under center. fifty-three seasons of weather and heartbreak in one parking lot. hard act to follow. allen took a swing at it on night one.

What comes next for the Bills and the Lions

Buffalo is 2-0 with the emotional hurdle cleared, which is the quiet gift here. No more questions about whether the new stadium will feel like anything. It felt like something immediately. The tougher test is whether it sounds like the old one in December, and nobody answers that in September.

Detroit walks out of a road opener in a hostile new building having been on the wrong end of somebody else's ceremony. That is a rough assignment for any team. The Lions have built their identity on being the ones who punch first, and they got punched first instead, in front of a crowd that had been waiting years to make noise in that room. How they respond is the whole story of their next few weeks.

What I'm watching next is simple: whether Allen's five-touchdown night was the building doing something to Detroit or Allen doing something to Detroit. Those are very different answers, and the next month tells us which one it was.