Fever, Tsunami, Tomato...

There are any number of ways to gauge the extent of Bears’ fever in these parts. Me, I go with the equivalent of taking my temperature with an old, oral thermometer; drop it, and it breaks, with beads of mercury everywhere. But you just can’t teach a dinosaur new tricks. I’m sure you could check social media, but I tend to shy away from that stuff, and the next podcast I listen to will be the first; if I need to listen to someone drone on about sports, there’s a friend I can call, or I can just talk to myself in the shower. Push comes to shove, I’m a dead-tree kind of guy. You’ll miss print when it’s gone, believe me. So, just for fun, I checked to see where the Sun-Times put the Bulls-Warriors’ story in the Monday paper. It wasn’t on the back page; that had a Bears’ picture. And it wasn’t on the next page or the next or the next. Everything was either Bears or ads for nine full pages. Like I said, any Chicago team sharing the calendar with the Munsters can expect this kind of treatment if they’re not playing well, and even winning is no guarantee of coverage. Come the draft in April (let’s dare assume a return to normal times), and it’s a zero-sum game; expanded coverage has to come from somewhere. Bad basketball or hockey season, and that’s where it’ll come from. Bulls and Hawks fighting for the playoffs, then space—and time—gets taken from the Cubs and White Sox. Afterall, it’s April, and those guys have at least five more months to get noticed. Actually, it’s not even that long. Barring COVID (and by all means keep a good thought), there’s rookie camp and voluntary workouts in May followed by minicamp in June and training camp in late July. Play .500 baseball in Chicago, and you all but guarantee getting buried deep inside the sports’ section whenever the Bears show their collective faces. But, hey, if things play out on Sunday, we could jump up to the sixth seed. Just sayin’.