Un-Bearable

First of all, the ball was tipped. Check the slo-mo replay.

And so, no, Cody Parkey is not really Public Enemy No. 1 in Chicago today, even though the memes were funny and instantaneous -- the one with Sandra Bulloch's blindfolded head photoshopped onto Parkey's body popped up, like, five minutes after the game -- and even though it wasn't the first time he'd doinked one off a post this season.

But this time?

This time was especially excruciating, whether Parkey was the true villain or not. Not just off the post, but off the crossbar. At Soldier Field. In the first playoff game for the Bears in eight years.

A bit of English -- the tiniest fraction -- the other way as the football tumbled from post to crossbar, and Parkey's the hero. The Bears, reborn in the image of another Bears team with a soul-crushing defense and a decent-but-not-great quarterback, survive and advance. And Chicago is still the City of Big Shoulders and not, well, the City of Cloudy With A Chance Of F-Bombs.

I mean, I live three hours away from Chi, and I could hear the screams when Parkey's attempt bounced once, bounced twice, and rolled back toward the goal line. The screams were not PG, and they were not particularly imaginative. One-word vocabularies rarely are.

Only the Cubs are supposed to induce heartbreak like this, and even the Cubs haven't done so in awhile. The Bears, until the ball hit the post, hadn't, either, this year. They came in 12-4, and they did it the Bears Way: Defense, a run game and a quarterback (Mitchell Trubisky) who's improving weekly but still cut from the mold of Chicago quarterbacks past.

Which is to say, serviceable most of the time, occasionally quite a bit more than that.

But the Bears ran into another stout defense last night, and also a quarterback (Nick Foles) with some kind of weird magic going on no one can adequately explain. And so it came to down to Parkey, and to a fingernail (or two) scraping the football as it crossed the line of scrimmage, and doink ... doink. And you just knew in your bones, at that moment, that God was a Packers fan.

Sitting up there in the fastness of heaven. Eating cheese curds and drinking Milwaukee's Best. Wearing a throwback Ray Nitschke jersey and high-fiving the Man himself, Vince Lombardi.

"Winning isn't everything," Vince is saying. "It's the only thing."

The Lord of all creation chuckles.

"Ah, not the only thing, Vince. Watch what I do to this kick."