(670 The Score) The Khalil Mack Bears experience peaked in his second quarter.
It was on Sept. 9, 2018 that Mack roared into NFL history at Lambeau Field with a strip-sack of Packers quarterback DeShone Kizer that he followed shortly after with an interception that he returned 27 yards for a touchdown, becoming the first player in 36 years to record a forced fumble, sack, fumble recovery, interception and touchdown in a half.
His Bears would eventually lose that game 24-23, and Mack would go on to compile mostly productive statistical totals over the next four seasons while making three Pro Bowls and never winning a playoff game in Chicago.
What's left are some draft picks and some cap space, lots of 52s hanging in closets around town and distant memories of a time when expectations were a real thing, when a Bears general manager could double down on his bold move for a quarterback by paying a dear price for a generational pass rusher and declaring himself "all in" for a run at a championship.
Now Mack is gone in a trade to the Chargers, Mitchell Trubisky is looking for work and Ryan Pace is a faceless front office factotum in Atlanta, the three of them quite all out.
It's a rebuild, make no mistake.
The 2022 second-round draft pick and 2023 sixth-rounder was less of a return from the Chargers than new Bears general manager Ryan Poles would likely have received had he offered to assume a portion of the remaining money owed to Mack -- one of the aspects that allows us to question what such a move still portends and what it says about his early assessments of the overall work to be done.
One interpretation is that he wants the flexibility to bolster second-year quarterback Justin Fields right away, using the valuable pick and/or the available dollars on someone to either protect him or get open for him in a way that fortifies his confidence and accelerates his development toward whatever the previous regime had defined as his projected level.
The other possibility is that Poles is willing to embark upon a broader teardown effort that runs concurrently with at least another two years of Fields' cost-efficient rookie deal, a sign that he may not be held in the same esteem by those inheriting him as he was by their predecessors.
It's likely to be neither absolute, though, instead the result of a reasonable and dispassionate conclusion that the Bears' distance from contention and lack of resources requires some undoing before more doing on any schedule.
Mack wasn't going to be a part of the next really good Bears team, in other words. If you want to start applying that test to other veterans who may have market value, it may not be a bad idea. This roster needs work.
It's still a shock to the system when it actually happens, however, the cold recognition of disappointment over what Mack and the Bears never were, the fault of both mismanagement and the inexorable grind of injury.
Everything was so promising, once, never more so than after just one half on that one night that seems forever ago.
Dan Bernstein is the co-host of the Bernstein & Rahimi Show on middays from 9 a.m. until noon on 670 The Score. You can follow him on Twitter @Dan_Bernstein.