Chicago Bears: Bears-Patriots trip down misery lane

Even a Bears’ Hall-of-Famer couldn’t escape the curse of Bears-Patriots. It is all-encompassing.It was bad enough that this was only one of two black marks on the Bears’ 2006 schedule (that last week when nothing mattered loss to the Packers definitely wasn’t). It wasn’t so much that this felt like a big test the Bears didn’t pass. And it wasn’t even so bad that this was the first or among the first, games that season where Rex Grossman‘s radar occasionally would just tune to, “Chuck it deep and hope for pass interference?”

No, the worst part was in the fourth quarter, and a 3rd-and-2 on the Bears’ six-yard-line for New England, with the Bears hoping to hold them to a field goal. Which they should have, and had they the game might have turned out different.

And then Tom Brady juked Brian Urlacher out of his jock.

This was Tom Brady, who even 12 years ago had the mobility of ennui. Who never rushed. Against Brian Urlacher, perhaps the greatest linebacker of his generation. Urlacher never missed. That was his thing. You couldn’t lose him, you couldn’t outrun him. And he got faked out for a first down by a stiff peacock with Uggs.

Brady’s grin as he got up certainly didn’t help. It never does. It’s the same one he flashes when selling a watch you’d need three loans to buy. Things were always going to work out for Brady. It was yet another stamping of that. And even one of the best Bears of all-time watched his limbs turn into goo at the moment of truth when faced with him. That’s Brady, and that was the Bears.