There's kind of two levels of being a football fan. On the one hand, you want your team to play well. You want them to be getting better. You want them to play solid games in which they beat their opponents for entire games. You want them to dominate.

But on another, more sublime level, that doesn't really matter. I know the Bears didn't play all that well tonight, and I spent most of the game really depressed and angry about what I was seeing. But in the end, it was all worth it. No amount of solid play could've felt better than watching the Packers final kick get blocked. Frankly, almost nothing in the world feels better than moments like that.

This is a Bears team with a lot of flaws, and they're pretty much the same flaws they've had for the past several years. It's a little bit frustrating. But, at the same time, what happened tonight (just as I heard Alex Brown saying in a postgame radio interview) maybe even topped the Arizona game in 2006 in terms of pure excitement, in the end.

It is irrational, stressful, and sometimes totally devastating--but when Alex Brown gets his hand on a chip shot field goal to send the game into overtime, when I find myself jumping into the air and screaming (in public!) at the ball's broken careen, when the most improbable shoestring of hope I let myself foolishly cling to pays off, when the coin toss bounces off of Urlacher's head and Orton and then Forte each make the exactly one play they really need to make, when Robbie Gould comes out and calmly continues to live up to his name's symbolic standard--Praise Payton I fucking love being a Bears fan!