NOT DEAD YET, MOTHERFUCKER

After how putrid this team has been at times this year, it boggles my mind to think that they're a win over the Texans and a Vikings loss to the Giants away from actually winning the division and backing in to the playoffs. Sure, the pessimist in me is telling me that the Giants have nothing to play for and that next week will just be the televised rape of the Bears' secondary by Andre Johnson, and the completely rational part of my mind is telling me that the Bears have no chance at doing anything in the playoffs, and that I should just be cursing the last three wins for screwing up next year's draft position, but fuck it. If this was about rationality, I wouldn't be watching some grown men getting paid more in one hour than I'll see in a lifetime to throw a ball around while I ponder how much of their merchandise I should buy, and if I always listened to my inner pessimist, I'd have swallowed the sleeping pills years ago. So until reality sets in, I'm just going to sit here and be quietly pumped for a while, which is pretty much all you can hope for from a night of professional footballery.

On the other hand, Mike Brown went down tonight, and given his injury history and the fact that the season has a pretty good chance of only lasting one more game anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if that's it for him in 2008, and considering his contract status, it's a safe bet that he won't be back with the Bears in 2009, and might just hang it up for good. And man, whenever the word finally comes down that he's done in Chicago, that's going to be some heartbreaking shit for me. He's been probably my favorite player the Bears have had since Neal Anderson back in the day, and those two crazy-ass interception returns for overtime touchdowns in 2001 were two of my all-time greatest football memories. When things have turned shitty over the years, he would usually look like the only Bear on the field who actually cared about the games, he's been the heart and soul of this team for the last nine years, and even with Grossman's worthless ass in there, I still think that they'd have won Super Bowl XLI if Brown had been on the active roster that day. Had everything gone down the way it should have, he'd have been one of the all-time Bear legends, and it's a goddamn shame that his lasting legacy will be that of the dude who missed 45 out of 64 games from 2005 to 2007. If this is it, he's still got a lot of football-brains going on, so maybe he can catch on as a coach or something. Certainly couldn't do any worse than Babich.