Mighty big night Saturday at Soldier Field, you probably heard.
The biggest Bears game since 2018, it was widely surmised.
For the surging Bears, a chance to protect their house against the mother of all unwelcome guests — their perpetual tormentors, the Packers.
Another opportunity — the Bears’ best one in years — to turn the tide in a purportedly great rivalry that for three-plus decades has been so one-sided, it might as well be viewed as the NFL’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters vs. the Washington Generals.
God bless it, this felt like a moment to change everything.
And then? You know what happened then. The wild, the weird, the wayward and the drop-dead amazing. Somehow, all of it added up to a 22-16 victory for the Bears in overtime.
We’ll talk about this for years, and then for years longer. Or will we? Well, it depends where Bears-Packers goes from here.
“We know who we are,” quarterback Caleb Williams said after his most heroic 11th-hour turn in a season full of them.
They are comeback specialists. Winners of 11 games and losers of only four despite a bevy of season statistics that suggest something more like .500. Likely NFC North champions. Certainly, playoff-bound for the first time in too long.
After Williams found DJ Moore for 46 yards of overtime glory, it felt like the Packers’ mastery of all things Bears had finally run its course.
Of course, that’s just how it felt. The reality of things might be different.
Bears-Packers is the ultimate long game, not some one-off, and the NFL’s oldest rivalry still needs a hell of a lot more juice than even this Hollywood finish provided. And only the Generals — sorry, the Bears — can provide it. That was going to be the case whether the Bears lost for the 13th time in the last 14 meetings against the Packers or won by 50.
Someday, these miserable facts will be footnotes, but for now, there’s still no hiding from them. The Bears still have lost nine of the last 11 games against the Packers in December; 14 of the last 16 (and 26 of the last 32) at Soldier Field; and 21 of the last 26 overall since coach Lovie Smith was fired after the 2012 season. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers started his reign of terror against the Bears even before that. Predecessor Brett Favre had shown him how it was done.
“Is it even a rivalry anymore?” Rodgers smugly asked in a 2024 appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show,” his time in Green Bay finished. “If they can’t beat us, is it a rivalry?”
Not much of one, truth be told, though that changed a bit Saturday, no doubt.
“I told the guys in the locker room and I’ll reiterate it: This is a special group,” coach Ben Johnson said.
“You start feeling [the] belief coming. This group — I’m talking about coaches and players combined — it’s rare, it really is.”
Perhaps it is just that. Give general manager Ryan Poles a tip of the helmet for his role in putting the team together. Give Johnson every ounce of praise there is for a performance that might be one of the best for a first-year coach the NFL has seen in decades. Give Williams a slap of the forehead for his fourth quarters, and the team’s veterans their due for holding morale together in every circumstance.
When veteran Grady Jarrett, a newcomer to the team, talked during the week about how much “fun” the Bears-Packers rivalry is, it was spoken like a guy who hasn’t been around long enough to associate green and gold with humiliation and despair. But this year, he was right.
There’s no doubt Williams meant it when he said this week, “I like our chances, us vs. anybody.”
But bygone nightmare Rodgers also meant it in 2018 when he said, after the Bears won 24-17 at Soldier Field to clinch their last NFC North title, “I like our chances in this division moving forward.” And we know all too well how that went.
The point being: One Bears win doesn’t necessarily mean anything in regard to the long arc of a rivalry.
A Sun-Times story entering that Bears win in 2018 asked, “Are we due for [a] volatile swing in the rivalry? Ryan Pace looks like he’s building sustainable success, with Matt Nagy developing Mitch Trubisky and the offense and an established defense already in place.”
Imagine that — a general manager not yet bumbling, a rookie coach not yet in over his head and a supposed-to-be franchise QB not yet gone bust. But who was worried about any of that? The Bears sacked Rodgers five times and won the division for the first time since 2010. The fans waved white towels with all their might. After it was over, Nagy pointed to the adoring crowd and pumped his fists as he exited the field and went up the tunnel into what had to seem to all watching like a bright future.
Three years later, Rodgers and the Packers still “owned” the Bears, as the QB famously informed the world after running across the goal line at Soldier Field for a game-clinching touchdown.
Nagy never beat the Packers again, losing six straight. Then Matt Eberflus went 0-5. Johnson will have his chance to do better, maybe much better. At 1-1, he’s off to a fine start.
But it’s a long game. The Packers already know this. The Bears have merely scratched the surface.
