The matriarch

 Virginia McCaskey breathed her last this week at the stubborn age of 102, on the cusp of yet another Super Bowl in which her football team will not play. 

I guess if you could sum her up in one sentence, that would be it.

On the one hand, she was the matriarch of the NFL, having sat in the big chair longer than any other current owner. She took over the Chicago Bears when her daddy, George Halas, died in 1983, and she was still at the top of the letterhead when she passed 42 years later. 

Whether she should have been, and whether her family still should have been, is a topic currently being hotly debated in Chicago and its environs. And that's other part of her legacy.

Under her, and her family's, direction, the Bears played in two Super Bowls in 42 seasons. They won in 1986 with Walter Payton and the greatest single-season defense in league history. They lost to another Peyton and the Indianapolis Colts in 2007. They haven't been close to being back since.

Since losing a wild-card game to New Orleans in 2020, the Bears haven't sniffed the playoffs, going 21-47 in the four seasons since. They've burned through two head coaches in that time (the Matts, Nagy and Eberflus) and drafted two alleged franchise quarterbacks -- one of whom (Justin Fields) they gave up on so they could pick the other one (Caleb Williams). The jury's still out on the latter, although he did just have the best rookie season in franchise history while playing for an awful team.

It got so bad this season, cries of  "Sell the team" were heard in Soldier Field, directed of course at Virginia and her family. This was a cut above the advice you usually hear from the bleachers, but realists understood the chances of the McCaskeys actually taking that advice hovered somewhere between zero and zero.

Now?

Well, you'd think the matriarch's passing might lead to an organizational shakeup, but probably not. The McCaskeys are as entrenched in Chicago as the Germans were at the Somme, after all. Maybe Virginia's passing will lead to mystical, magical things on the football field this fall, or maybe it won't. Bears fans can only hope.

Less fanciful minds, of course, realize the Bears are still the Bears, and will no doubt continue to do Bears things. No matter what celestial strings Virginia and her daddy pull from the great beyond, that seems the more likely scenario at this point.

But, hey. Wouldn't it be a great storyline if it wasn't?