Too little time had elapsed Monday night to change Pro Player Stadium from the field of champions into something more befitting the winless Bears, a field of failure.
Traces of the World Series were tarped over and painted out, but the skinned infield remained, including the infamous spot where Tony Fernandez had avoided a significant groundball, there on the near side of the 40-yard stripe.
Just there on the 35, Jim Leyland had accepted the World Series trophy, and the Bears’ bench stretched from left to center field, where less than a full day earlier Edgar Renteria’s championship-winning single had landed.
Nothing that could happen here this night could match these reminders. Or could it?
“Character,” said Bears coach Dave Wannstedt, “that’s the only way to sum it up. Anyone who questions any of the men on this team, well, our guys deserved to win this game.”
Win? Did he say win? A football game? The Bears?
If the Bears cannot make history of their own, the aroma of it was still fresh enough to inhale. Maybe a little bit of the Marlins rubbed off. Extra innings. Overtime. Same thing.
Dinky single. Field goal. Same thing.
World Series championship in the first five years. First victory of the year. It looked the same on the faces of the Bears.
This was Monday Night Football and yet it wasn’t, a makeshift expedient, as much an afterthought nationally to the real show between the Packers and the Patriots as it was locally to the Florida Marlins.
On Tuesday, 70,000 still-giddy baseball disciples will fill the place to honor the Marlins. Those here Monday night for the Bears and Dolphins seemed as out of joint as if they had shown up for the wrong wedding, and after the vows had been said.
The football started as half-hearted as the attention, though in the case of the Bears, half a heart can be seen as growth. The Dolphins played as if owed a victory and the Bears as if deserved one.
“After all our guys have been through,” Wannstedt said, “it would have been tough to leave this stadium without a positive result.”
Bears President Michael McCaskey, on pregame radio, had disclosed what he was looking for in the Bears from here on.
“Fighting and scrapping,” McCaskey had said, implying that not enough of that sort of thing had been occurring on the way to 0-7.
No doubt both are good, but a few field goals never hurt either, and the Bears won largely because of four of them from Jeff Jaeger, the last one from 35 yards in overtime after a sack of Dan Marino by Barry Minter and a fumble recovery by Carl Reeves.
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Fighting and scrapping, indeed.
It is good to know what the boss wants and there hasn’t been much indication of that from McCaskey during the last dismal couple of months.
McCaskey said he had great hopes for the Bears in training camp, saw the playoffs as possible for anyone who thinks McCaskey is not a man of vision.
That 0-7 thing was a “stinging disappointment,” he said. Stinging should, of course, be inflicted by the Bears and not on them, along with the fighting and scrapping, I’m guessing.
“Too many people care too much about winning not to feel this in a painful and hurtful way,” McCaskey said.
He feels your pain, Bear fans.
As for what’s next with Wannstedt, McCaskey did not seem anxious to sting, fight or scrap with the only head coach he has ever hired, not a majority position around town.
“This feels good,” Wannstedt said, a winner for the first time since last December.
But there was a bit of ominous Steinbrennerish backing and blaming in the matter of Rick Mirer, the single most destructive piece of this season’s sad pile.
McCaskey said he took the recommendation of all those involved (pre-Mark Hatley, McCaskey pointed out) on Mirer, relying on their professional judgment.
That must sting.