(670 The Score) If it's any cold comfort, none of it mattered much anyway. We knew we were making it feel like it did because we still could, squeezing whatever was left out of a lost season after the Bears' too-late spasm of competence and relevance.
And now even that faint hope is over, snuffed out by the Packers at Lambeau Field on Sunday by a score of 21-13. We needn't continue to assess all of the various permutations beyond the Bears' control, because they again failed at the part that was of their own doing.
Our pretend drama lasted up until the very end of the bizarre final play that was snapped with one last second of viability on the clock, an appropriately chaotic series of rugby laterals that ended up with the ball out just a couple yards shy of the end zone. The Bears would've needed a two-point conversion even had they scored with such sorcery, then would have been tasked with winning an overtime game on the road, so it's hard for it to seem a sensible exercise when we play out the endless variables of what could have been. And in that way, this game was an apt recapitulation of a 2019 season that began with such euphoric expectation and came up far too short.
One more touchdown, one fewer interception, a break from the officials or the pain of an unjust call. We've spent too much time choosing our alternative own adventures all year, living in this world of other possible outcomes because the real one offers no good answers.
From here the attention turns even further forward, toward the effort to reclaim what could be either the final year of this entire Bears regime or the kind of playoff run that culminates in contract extensions. It's about making these last two games best inform personnel decisions and draft priorities, confronting some obvious shortcomings as honestly and productively as possible.
The running game needs an overhaul, from the formations to the blocking and just getting vectors more down the field than sideline to sideline. On a day that promised opportunity on the ground against a struggling Packers run defense on a terrible playing surface, 67 yards from Bears running backs doesn't cut it. Mitchell Trubisky gave us his usual sampler platter that allows observers to see what they want: his signature mix of crisp passes and athleticism to keep plays alive as well as open receivers inexplicably unseen and unconscionable throws that result in interceptions or so many near ones. He plays out these final two games to determine how competitive for the starting job his 2020 backup may be.
A Bears defense this strong can't miss as many tackles as it does. More effort must be made to assure that a player as talented as Khalil Mack can affect a game more than he did, even against an opponent determined to remove his threat. And it's time to earmark some real money for Nick Kwiatkoski.
We can thank the Bears' late autumn surge for carrying the vestiges of playoff possibility up through the final second of a game on Dec. 15, perhaps considerably longer that we once imagined when they were 3-5 at the halfway point. But there's no mitigating the ultimate disappointment of this.
The 2019 Bears ended in northern Wisconsin, like a doomed panfish reeled from below the ice and left on it to slowly freeze, staring endlessly at the gray sky.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's Bernstein & McKnight Show in midday. You can follow him on Twitter @Dan_Bernstein.
