On the John
To my fellow Bears fans
Completed on February 4, 2007 (10:37 PM)
It is 9:36 PM.
My team just lost the Super Bowl.
This sucks.
Is it all bad? No. It’s not all bad. Some would say that it’s not all bad because I root for the second best team in the NFL. Some take solace in that. I do not. That is not the reason why it’s not all bad.
The reason why it’s not all bad is that I root for the Chicago Bears. That makes me feel good. The Chicago Bears are my team, and I love them. And it’s not just the franchise. I love this team. These 2006 Chicago Bears. The Bears of Lovie Smith. Urlacher and TJ and Briggs and Peanut and Kreutz and Mike Brown and Berrian and Vasher and Alex Brown and Hunter Hillenmeyer and Wale and Ian Scott. I love all those guys. Chris Harris and Tommie Harris and Dev Hester and Jason McKie and Mark Anderson and Israel Idonije and Cameron Worrell and Robbie Freakin’ Gould. I love them too.
And yes, I love Rex. Still.
I said all week that if the Bears lost, it would be because they did a lot of things horribly wrong. And they did. Not just the obvious, the fumbled snaps and the picks. We missed a bunch of tackles. We couldn’t stop their run. We couldn’t keep Peyton off the field. We couldn’t run the ball until the second half (apart from the TJ 52-yard dash) and even when we were running well, we weren’t running often. We carried the ball only 19 times against their 42. We were 3 of 10 on third down conversions. We were unable to pressure the quarterback.
So that was bad.
But it’s not all bad, because the Chicago Bears are still my team, and even if that means that I am beyond sad right now, life is good. Yes, it sucks to lose the Super Bowl. I know that now. And even though there is an instinct to say that all is well because this Bears’ team is At The Beginning, I think that’s missing the point. I do not know what will happen in the future. Will we get back? We should. But will we?
One never knows.
What one does know is that the Chicago Bears are my team, and that’s enough. For 25 years I’ve been a Bears fan, and barring something extraordinarily freakish and sad, I will be a Bears fan for the rest of my life. The majority of those seasons have been “bad.” The majority of the rest will probably be bad as well. But I enjoyed those teams. Everyone will remember Payton and Butkus and Singletary and Urlacher. Only the Bears fans remember Donnell Woolford and Marty Booker and Raymont and Dante Jones. And the same can be said for any other fan of any other team.
That’s what this is about. It’s about dedication. It’s about giving yourself to a team, about taking the highs and the lows. Cliché? Sure. But it’s the truth.
So, yes, I feel like crap right now. I can only imagine how the team is feeling. What bothers me the most is that we played like straight ass tonight; we failed to show the football fans of America just what made this team great. This was arguably the worst game we played all season. Worse than Miami, worse than Green Bay, worse than any of the “Bad Rex” wins. This was all kinds of bad. Certainly not the way that you want to end your season.
But it’s one game. It’s just one game. It does not mean that we are a bad team, and it does not mean that we had a bad season. All it means is that we didn’t win the Super Bowl. That’s it. Ah well. So it goes.
I made a t-shirt today, one that I was very excited to throw on. It was a navy blue shirt with orange lettering. The front reads “SUPER BOWL CHAMPS”. The back reads “AND DON’T IT FEEL GOOD?”. I was so excited to wear that shirt tonight. Now I wonder if I’ll ever take it out of my drawer.
So we lost one game. A big one, but just one, and what we are left with is a wonderful football team that gave us a wonderful season. And maybe this team will be Back With a Vengeance. And maybe they will be back in the Super Bowl. And maybe they’ll win two in a row as did the ’71-’73 Dolphins, and maybe they’ll drop four in a row as did the ’90-’93 Bills. Or maybe everything will fall apart with injuries and free agency, and by the time the Bears are back in the Super Bowl it will be a new team with a new coach in a new decade. Who knows. But we’ll put up with the Rex-bashing, and we’ll deal with the pain of losing, and we’ll head into the 2007 season happy and healthy and ready for more. And you know why? Because we’re fans, and that’s what we do.
I am a fan of the Chicago Bears.
And don’t it feel good.
Copyright 2007, jm silverstein