Stumbling Towards Glorious

I'm way too busy. Kids, job, blog, talk show, house, rudiments of a social life - something's gotta give.

For me, traditionally, that something is television - especially televised sports. I just don't ever sit in the living room watching sports. Never. I haven't watched an NFL game in at least a decade.

So for the most part, I've let the ebbs and flows of the NFL pretty much pass me by (although the Vikings don't so much ebb and flow as they congeal).

That being said...

This is so freakin' cool!

I've been a Bears fan since I was about four years old. Not "fan" to the extent that I really follow the team or anything - I just always want the Bears to win. Every season, I predict the Bears will go all the way. Unlike Vikings fans, I've been right once.

When I was a kid, it was hard being a Bears fan. Vikings fans in North Dakota are an even bigger bunch of jack-booted droogs than they are in Minnesota. And yet when I was a kid I sat and thrilled when the then-lowly Bears would beat the Vikings (most famously in 1971, when the Bears came back from a two-touchdown deficit inside the two-minute warning to beat the Vikes by three points, with Kent Nix at the helm.

The '86 Bears, of course, expiated much of the loser cachet from the seventies' Bears; the Payton/Dent/Singletary/McMahon years were great ones for Bears fans both boiling and lukewarm. The nineties and the new century have both been returns to form (at least for those of us who came to the Bears after their great heyday from the thirties through their '63 NFL Championship, their last until '86).

But days like today are glorious, joyous reminders of everything the Bears represent; When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose; and decade in, decade out, the arrogance of the Vikings is matched only by their ineptitude and the pure glee I (and all Bears fans) feel when they get tripped up by our lowly, loveable Bears.

So a loud, wet raspberry to all of you Vikings fans. And next year? All the way, baby.