I woke up sad.
Sleep-smeared eyes skittered over the ceiling as I tried to find context for the feeling and I remembered, "The Bears lost." A series of mental snapshots followed: D'Andre Swift getting knocked out of the air by a helmet to his taint. Williams launching a last-minute bomb to Kmet in the endzone. Sean McVay staring blankly at the field as the game went to overtime. Kam Curl snatching the ball out of the air before it hits the ground, killing a Bears overtime drive and setting up the game-winning Rams field goal.
This is not a new feeling. What was new was the sadness that it meant this season is over, that there weren't more Bear games to look forward to. The Bears have not really been a source of fun and happiness in my adult life. The 2006 team was probably the last time I felt uncomplicated love for Chicago's historic and historically hapless football franchise. Years of Jay Cutler had their ups and downs but it was hard to like Cutler and it was even harder to trust that the team would not fall short in the most painful possible way. I wanted the Bears to win, but I treated their games like MRI or endoscopy appointments. Something unpleasant to get through to find out if you were going to be okay or if you were totally doomed.
I don't think you can understand the difference between being a fan of a cursed team versus a bad one until you have lived it, the sourness that works its way into your heart and even your sense of reality. Until this season, the moment that best captured the Chicago Bears for me was an Aaron Rodgers touchdown fumble back in 2013. The Double-Doink, Cutler getting knocked out in the NFC Championship game against the Packers, Peyton Manning torching a depleted Bears defense in the Super Bowl… none of that rates compared to this one play that was pure Bears Football.
With the season on the line, the Bears were playing a "win-and-in" game against the Packers to advance to the playoffs. The Bears were leading early, and I was getting happily drunk as I watched an Aaron Rodgers pass get batted to the ground. I cheered, the Bears began shuffling back toward the middle of the field. The Packers' Jarrett Boykin wandered over to the ball and picked it up curiously. Rodgers sidled next to him and muttered something, waving his hand toward the endzone. Boykin shuffle-jogged away. Confused, a couple Bears turned like they were thinking about pursuing, but Boykin was already past them. He crossed the goal line and, against all reason, the officials raised their arms to signal a touchdown.
The next few minutes were a hallucination of improbable replays. Rodgers hadn't thrown a pass, the ball was knocked out of his hand by a Bears defender with such force and angle that it looked like an errant pass, but it was clearly a fumble. The officials never blew the play dead. The Packers were the first to realize the ball was live, Rodgers' body language that of a man who has just spotted a bag full of cash lying on the ground and doesn't want to over-react and give away what he's thinking. The Bears didn't seem to fully believe what was happening and acted almost as if they could kill the play just by committing to the idea that it was over. That surely nobody would award a touchdown like this. Then they did and, as every Bear fan watching at home knew they would, the Bears unraveled, committing turnovers and errors that resulted in yet another close defeat in a season that was full of them.
That's been the experience of the Bears for most of my life. A team so traumatized by failure and disappointment that the first bad break in a game could trigger a collapse. A team coached to miss important details, conditioned to wait for someone to tell them what to do rather than react. A team terrified to have opportunities or to take chances because that would risk failure, so they'd spend entire seasons in a kind of defensive curl, just trying to win via the clock rather than the score. A team that would play like this for years on end and then turn around and complain that the media and their fans didn't believe in them, didn't respect them.
That wasn't the case with the 2025 Chicago Bears. From a rocky beginning they turned into a team that went from fluke victories to a pattern of incredible resilience and uncanny clutch performance. For the first time in my life I'd feel hope and excitement when I saw a Bears quarterback launch a deep pass with everything on the line. I'd enjoy comebacks in close games because they weren't just prefaces to crushing disappointment. I liked the way my phone would buzz for hours after a game as old friends checked-in, and a half dozen different group texts would share the same half-dozen highlights as if we hadn't all seen the same play.
Even people who never really followed the Bears before got onboard with this team, remarkable for a franchise that's historically repelled interest from the rest of the NFL world. You could hear how much broadcast teams liked covering their games. I am pretty sure Collinsworth and Tirico would have blocked that Rams kick if they could have, knowing that as good and deserving as they are, they're not a story the way the 2025 Bears were.
So I'm sad about the end of the Bears season the way I was sad hugging my friends goodbye after we went to that absurd Star Wars hotel, or watching my parents drive away after their first visit to our new home. A wonderful experience is over, and I wish I could have just one more day of it. But I'll take that feeling of sadness over the feeling of frustrated relief that has so often accompanied the end of a Bears season.
Is one good season enough to banish a lifetime of grim history? Of course not. But I can't overstate the number of demons the 2025 Bears slew over the course of their campaign. Two unforgettable comeback wins against the Packers, one in the playoffs to end their season and perhaps send them into their own existential crisis. An incredible series of misfortunes and miscues against a wounded Bengals team that ended with a miraculous comeback drive that, historically, the Bears never successfully execute. An improbable turnover followed by an another incredible comeback drive against the Commanders, the team that caused the Bears to fall apart completely in 2024, followed by a walk-off field goal by stand-in kicker Jake Moody, who was trying to redeem himself following a terrible season that cost him his longtime job with the 49ers. As the ball sailed through the uprights, the ghost of Cody Parkey finally departed Chicago's collective consciousness.
And above all, there's Caleb Williams. Flawed, often frustrating. But at a point in his career where previous Bears quarterbacks have fallen apart, showing that they don't have what it takes to be effective starters and don't have the mental makeup to perform well with the game on their shoulders, he showed the opposite. Fourth-quarter and overtime Caleb Williams has been seen too many times this year to be a mirage. He might be one of the reasons the Bears needed a cargo pocket full of miracles to win these games, but he's undoubtedly one of the biggest reasons they did win them.
It's fitting the Bears had this season in a year when the sports world has been delighted by the fact that a South Side priest is now the Bishop of Rome. Because the Bears are a team that operated more on faith than reason. A lot of the statistics they amassed this year did not suggest they were a particularly good team. At their worst they seemed entirely fraudulent. But watching them you started to understand why people who have spent enough time around sports eventually reach a point where they lose interest in statistics and "the analytics" and the efficiency optimization games that every franchise plays and return to fuzzier, intangible concepts like clutch performance, willpower, and recognizing winners when you see them. In a repeated statistical simulation the Bears likely lost more than half the games they won this year. But in the flesh-and-blood reality of the sport, where instead of calculating and predicting an outcome a thousand times you get to play it once, they emerged victorious time and again.
Undoubtedly there will be analytical explanations for this Bears season, and we'll likely hear all about them on the eve of the 2026 season as we come to grips with the sheer improbability of this team having anywhere near the same success it enjoyed this year. But Bears fans know what they saw for the past 20 weeks: a team that didn't necessarily deserve their belief, but rewarded their faith.