Step right up. The Bears’ bandwagon is loading. Plenty of room. Don’t shove. Leave room for the band. Next stop . . . uh, what is the next stop?
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“We’re not O and something, we’re 1 and something,” said Bears defensive tackle Mike Wells.
Next stop, 2 and something. And after that, who knows, 3 and something? Before you know it, the Bears could be 4 and 4, officially and statistically mediocre.
“We could be in the playoffs,” said defensive end Mark Thomas.
Ah, the giddiness of winning a football game, the absolute ebullience of triumph, the radiant rapture of victory. If it really means this much to the Bears, they really ought to do it more often. Thomas was in tears after the game, bawling as if he had just been upgraded to first-class.
“This is the best feeling I have had since winning the Super Bowl,” Thomas said. So Thomas didn’t actually play in the Super Bowl for the 49ers, he can still imagine how it feels.
Dave Wannstedt ran off the field without even waiting to hear the cheers, lest he find sarcasm in approval. His fist punched the air and his feet didn’t feel the ground. He will not be fired this week.
“We feel like we’re on a roll,” said receiver Chris Penn, apparently not referring to pastry.
Erik Kramer would not let go of the football, the one he carried into the end zone for the winning touchdown. He waved it in triumph as he scooted past the usual stations of scorn.
“Obviously, you see we’re a good team,” Kramer said, not kidding at all. “It’s been a while to have that exalted feeling of winning after a game.”
Counting preseason, it had been nine games, going back to last season’s next-to-last dance in St. Louis.
“A game we didn’t even want to win,” Wannstedt said, acknowledging the draft implications. That’s the way it has been, the Bears not being able either to win or to lose when they needed to.
Does winning beat losing? Well, it does skew your perspective. Whipping the Detroit Lions is not exactly the same as whipping the San Francisco 49ers, so I am assuming that Buffalo, another no longer 0-and-something team, has to be kissing strangers on the street.
How shameful would it have been for the Bears to lose to a rookie quarterback, a Charlie Batch, on a day that Barry Sanders was pretending to be a parking meter. How disgraceful if Wannstedt wasn’t able to outcoach Bobby Ross when Ross wouldn’t use Sanders to protect a 17-point lead.
“We’ll have to look at the film to see what they did (stopping Sanders),” Ross said.
Look in the mirror, Bobby.
Still, the Bears did climb back from their usual third-quarter hole–outscored 0-61 this year, 0-95 the last nine games–to win a football game. The climbing is as astonishing as the winning.
“We’re not a team of phenomenal athletes,” Wells said. “We know we have to grind it out, to be a bend-not-break team.”
A startling halfback pass from Edgar Bennett to Penn for a touchdown started the Bears back in the fourth quarter, but it was Kramer who won this game for the Bears, reminding the world that he can have days of great competence, that however shabby the rest of the Bears may be, Kramer is a true bit of value.
Kramer was whacked around by the Lions, losing two fumbles on sacks and another on the center snap. And yet with apprentice Curtis Enis out with back spasms, Kramer took the Bears on scoring drives of 75, 72 and 58 yards in the fourth quarter, completing 10 of 12 for 130 yards and a touchdown at a time when the Lions knew he would be trying to do just that.
“Now we’ve proved we can win,” Kramer said. “Hopefully we won’t have to be so dramatic each week.”
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Nothing wrong at all with a little drama, nothing wrong with a little more winning. “We’re over the hump, we’re over the hill,” Penn said.
And that is where the bandwagon is going.