Good, better, best?
Look, just get some rest.
Call it a minor Christmas miracle that the Bears — most of them, anyway — even took the field Sunday night in Santa Clara, California, given the flu bug pinballing around the team all week that sent players to the sick list like ants to a picnic.
A doleful dirge would have been more appropriate than ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner’’ before this game. Performed by — who else? — a flugelhornist, of course.
Fortunately for the Bears, however, it turned out to be more of a ‘‘phew’’ flu. As in, things could have been a heck of a lot more difficult if not for a confluence of influential events that not only put them into the playoffs but also made them NFC North champions before the game against the powerhouse 49ers even began. Win, lose or draw at Levi’s Stadium, it was going to be OK for the Bears in the big picture of a surprisingly excellent season.
Crazy to think, isn’t it, that just a bit more than a week ago, right up until the Bears converted an onside kick, forced overtime and then won with a walk-off touchdown against the Packers, it was entirely plausible they would miss the playoffs altogether. But one day later, the Lions blew a final opportunity to resurrect their own Super Bowl hopes, clinching a playoff berth for the Bears. Then Week 17 arrived, the Packers hosted the Ravens on Saturday and, thanks to future Hall of Famer Derrick Henry, groundskeepers still are pulling stomped cheese out of the turf at Lambeau Field. Just like that, the worst-to-first Bears were division champs for only the third time since the 2006 Super Bowl season.
Anyone with a bit of fluency about the recent history of the Bears knows how rare it is for everything to come together like that.
Then again, unlikely things have fallen into place for the cardiac Bears all season, and the team has come to expect such affluent outcomes. Nothing beats another fourth-quarter comeback — the signature of this team — except, maybe, for the celebration that comes after it.
‘‘The most joy, honestly, comes from coming into that locker room and seeing everybody smile,’’ quarterback Caleb Williams said during 49ers week. ‘‘The joy of it is that moment when you walk into the locker room, everybody’s happy, everybody’s cheering, everybody’s dancing. For all the hard work that we put in [and] the sacrifice that we make to be able to have those moments, that’s joy.’’
In a perfect story, the Bears would have won on the field to clinch the division, then gone bananas together afterward. But who has time for perfect? Especially in flu season.
And as long as we’re beating this ‘‘flu’’ bit to death, we might as well bring up beloved rookie head coach Ben Johnson’s bumbling, over-his-skis predecessor. You couldn’t forget Matt Eberflus if you tried, could you? ‘‘Flus’’ was sitting next to then-brand-new general manager Ryan Poles on the 2022 day both were introduced to the Chicago media and Poles promised, most audaciously, that the Bears would ‘‘take the NFC North and never give it back.’’
It never would have happened on Eberflus’ watch, but now the Bears have done — in one of the great 180s in franchise history — the first part. How long they can hold on to the North is a topic that can wait awhile because too much excitement is unfolding late in the regular season.
Lost in the hubbub of a division title, a flu frenzy and a prime-time game is the very real possibility the Bears will open the postseason as the NFC’s No. 2 seed against the No. 7 seed Packers at Soldier Field. The buildup to the first Bears-Packers playoff game in 15 years would be so intense, it would dwarf everything that came before it — the winning streak, the wild comebacks, the epic plays. The anticipation already titillates.
Win or lose, if that matchup comes in the wild-card round, we at least can be reasonably confident the Bears won’t have spent the days leading up to it blowing their noses and shivering under blankets. It’s so much better to have that out of the way.
For that, we can say, ‘‘Phew.’’
