Column: When the ax swings at Halas Hall this week, which Bears leaders will be left standing? For now, Chicago must wait.

And now Chicago must wait.

Not for long, hopefully. But there remains this inevitable period of awkwardness, of anxiety, of lingering uncertainty that figures to push through Sunday evening and into Monday. Tension and anticipation will hover until the leaders at the top of the Chicago Bears organization announce their plans, communicate a vision and assign accountability for the latest disappointing season.

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The on-field show for the 2021 season ended at 2:51 p.m. Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium, with Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins putting a “victory formation” kneel-down on a 31-17 win. For the Bears, that was loss No. 11 in another dispiriting season. And it came like an avalanche, with a 14-point first-half lead turning into the team’s eighth double-digit loss this season.

It was so Bears in so many ways. Busted coverages. Questionable play calls. An inability to consistently meet the biggest moments.

The unraveling came in what in all likelihood was Matt Nagy’s swan song as Bears coach. His firing has seemed imminent for more than a month, and that time likely has arrived. But Chicago also must wait to learn what general manager Ryan Pace’s fate is. And there are questions as to whether team President and CEO Ted Phillips will face at least moderate responsibility revisions.

At some point Monday, the onus will fall on Bears Chairman George McCaskey to clear up everything. That hasn’t always been a strength of McCaskey’s, particularly during a somewhat odd 511/2-week stretch during which he hasn’t taken questions from reporters, declining all interview requests.

That’s why this latest Halas Hall waiting game might carry a little more mystery than usual. Because there have been very few, if any, indications as to how McCaskey has processed everything that happened over the past 12 months — a stretch that began Jan. 13, 2021, with his full-throated vote of confidence in Pace and Nagy to get the Bears back on a championship course and that ended Sunday with the team on the wrong end of a 28-3 second-half steamrolling.

“It sucks,” linebacker Roquan Smith said.

Most Bears fans hope McCaskey has seen what they’ve seen, which is an inept football team that too often is overmatched by quality opponents. Within this season’s 6-11 record and third-place finish in the NFC North, the Bears went 2-4 in the division and 0-6 against NFC playoff teams with an average loss in those games of 35-18.

Dating back to Week 7 of 2020, the Bears have lost 19 of their last 28 games. And to find, within that trash heap, the sufficient progress and improvement McCaskey and Phillips requested for the 2021 season would require an extraordinary amount of optimism and/or denial.

Still, Nagy went back to a familiar well Sunday, again expressing his gratitude to a group of players that works hard and rarely comes apart, even in the most distressing times.

“I know how much they care,” Nagy said. “And I know how much they want to be better. To me, that matters.”

Sure. But how much?

“Again,” Nagy said, “we understand our record. We know that’s real and that’s a part of this. But do the guys care? Did they fight? They did do that.”

Sunday’s finale was a fitting representation of Nagy’s four years as Bears coach: an energized and promising start followed by an unfathomable implosion defined by offensive ineptitude.

For those who wanted one last stack of evidence for the Nagy pile-on, Sunday provided plenty. Worst of all, the Bears scored only one touchdown in 11 possessions, going 0-for-2 inside the red zone and failing five times on six fourth-down opportunities, frequently in miserable fashion.

One could argue the fourth-and-goal failure from the Vikings 1 midway through the third quarter proved most deflating. Andy Dalton was sacked for a loss of 15 yards one snap after the Bears quarterback thought he had scored on an 8-yard scramble. But he was ruled down a few feet short of the goal line and then hurled to the turf by Anthony Barr on the next play.

But to single out that malfunction as the day’s most painful would discount the pick-six Dalton threw to Patrick Peterson on fourth-and-1 three possessions later.

“Fourth downs are important plays,” Dalton said. “They tended to be the difference in this game today. It’s unfortunate we were unable to convert.”

And, well, that was about the extent of game analysis required with so many other much larger questions about the organization’s future still open-ended.

In what was likely his final news conference with the Bears, Nagy spoke for 15 minutes, remaining characteristically positive and composed while also acknowledging his biggest dreams in Chicago might be permanently dashed by Monday afternoon.

“The day I signed up to be the head coach here in Chicago, on a year-to-year basis, you’re always understanding of what comes with your position,” Nagy said. “That’s real. That’s life. The situation that we’re in this year is one where we know our record is not good enough. … This is all stuff that comes attached to that. You’ve got to deal with it. You can’t run from it.”

If Nagy expects or desires an opportunity to sell his superiors on why he should maybe, perhaps, possibly stick around, he seemed to do a bit of rehearsing Sunday, trying to convince outsiders the mess isn’t quite as bad as it appears.

Nagy spoke of the great people on the Bears roster and on his coaching staff. He highlighted a nucleus of talented young leaders that includes Smith, Darnell Mooney, David Montgomery and Jaylon Johnson.

He pointed to rookie quarterback Justin Fields

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“Both Ryan and I were a part of that,” Nagy emphasized.

He insisted he sees light.

“There’s a good thing going here right now,” Nagy said.

A few breaths later, he tacked on this: “There’s a really bright future for our team.”

That sentiment, of course, is not shared by a majority of outside observers. At this stage, major leadership changes seem necessary and likely inevitable.

McCaskey, through consultation with the Bears board of directors and perhaps even Phillips, now has the next move. Yet Chicago must wait. With understandable anxiety and a lack of confidence that the right moves will be made, Bears fans must wait. It remains a torturous existence.