Windy City Gridiron
“Daddy, if the Bears win today, are you going to do that thing with the champagne bottle where you pop the cork and shake it and it sprays?”
“No, I’ll do that when the Bears win the Super Bowl.”
…yet even as I answered her, I was thinking, Wow, how far we’ve come! Our daughter is eight years old and pretty much only knows champagne celebrations from watching other teams win. Her first and only championship was the Sky in 2021. She was young but she understood. We watched together, she and I, me explaining the stakes, her soaking them in, a revelatory experience for a burgeoning Chicago sports fan.
That win gave her The Love. She wanted to know when she could watch them again. She wanted to go to the stadium. I took her. She smiled the whole time. She asked for a t-shirt. She got one. The Sky won. She cheered. She pumped her fists. She celebrated. All the way home, she talked about that magic. And she wore that shirt. She’d had Chicago sports t-shirts before, but this one was different. This one, in a new way, in multiple ways, was hers.
That’s what the Bears gave her, our son, and a whole generation of young, wandering Bears fans on Saturday when they beat the Packers 31-27 in historic fashion. At last, these children had a Bears moment they lived themselves.
From 1933 to 2016, the Bears led the all-time head-to-head series over Green Bay. The Packers finally regained the lead in Week 4 of 2017, the first Bears-Packers game of our daughter’s life. She’s known only catastrophe. After more than 25 years of Favre-Rodgers annihilation, with a brief and needed reprieve led by Lovie and the guys, I really thought we had stopped the bleeding in 2018 when Mack and Floyd and Fast Eddie toppled #12 to clinch the North.
Instead, my daughter endured 10 straight losses to the Packers. She saw Daddy in agony after the Double Doink, in shock after the Wims drop, in a personal crisis when Jayden Daniels’s Hail Mary found its home. She saw us run through back-to-back failed franchise-saving quarterbacks, three head coaches and seven offensive coordinators. She and her younger brother saw an awful trend: Daddy watches the Bears game every week, no matter what noises they made him make the week before.
I saw an awful trend: the kids did not want to join me.
“You know what the ‘B’ in ‘BEARS’ stands for?” she asked me one day on the way to school during Matt Eberflus’s second season. I breathed in. I breathed out.
“Boring.”
Like a knife to the heart. And I couldn’t even argue.
She later expanded it to “Boring Entertainment At Rat Sea,” but I didn’t need to hear the rest (creative though it was!). “Boring” was enough.
“Who’s watching the Bears with me today!” I said a year, more as a presumptive exclamation than a true question.
She eyed me like a...
