Sports, real life crash head-on

"We had a little bit in the tank there at the end,'' said Lovie Smith, explaining the Bears' 34-31 overtime stinker win.

Oops.

Word choice.

If suspended, grieving, once-fully-armed-and-pit-bull-enhanced Terry Johnson had a nickname other than ''Tank'' -- like, say, ''Petunia'' -- the coach wouldn't have conjured up such unfortunate thoughts.

But this was the game week from hell for the Bears.

How they won this balloon-fest against the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers is another matter.

But when your starting defensive tackle gets his front door blown off by a SWAT team, and that tackle has more unregistered guns in his house than a small street gang, plus drugs, plus an ex-con buddy who will be killed shortly in a Chicago night club, you know you have more problems than simply giving up a 31-17 fourth-quarter lead to a lousy team that hasn't won a road game in a year.

And you need to choose your words carefully.

For instance, when Smith said, ''We plug players into our system,'' did he mean the Bears can keep on rolling no matter who gets arrested?

Did he mean the much-needed (on the field and in the muck, that is) Tank Johnson simply will be cut, with no recompense from another team and no one to replace him, a near-certain playoff roster disaster?

Did he mean that he, Lovie, is the moral and political boss of this 12-2, NFC-best team, when he said of possibly launching Johnson, ''I have a little bit of input on most of the things around here, and this would be one of those.''

It was so odd.

The Bears have home-field advantage through the playoffs, a three-game winning streak, a quarterback -- Rex Grossman, with a career-high 339 passing yards -- who has his groove back, and yet the locker room resembled a time-out room more than a victory den.

There should have been joyous celebrating from the team with a chance to have the Bears' best regular-season record in two decades.

Instead, there was tepid uncertainty.

The players seemed confused as to how they could have been up 24-3 late in the third quarter, only to see the impotent Bucs narrow the score to 24-17 at the start of the fourth.

And nobody had a good explanation for how second-string quarterback Tim Rattay completed three passes for 114 yards and two touchdowns, to tie the game at 31, in just three plays.

''We can't give that up,'' Smith said. But they did.

And if the Bears hadn't stripped the ball from Bucs tight end Alex Smith in overtime, then won the slow battle for field position, they might have gone down in this confusing mess.

Ignoring the ethical questions raised by the Bears now being fully-fledged members of the NFL Police Auxilary Club -- with six arrests in the last year -- there was the question of Super Bowl readiness.

With 77 seconds left in regulation, the Bears, at their 10, made no attempt to march upfield and score.

''That's a decision coach Smith made,'' Grossman said. ''And it turned out to be a good one.''

It worked out, let's put it that way.

But 77 seconds would be enough for about a dozen NFL quarterbacks to set up a game-winning field goal with ease.

It just seemed odd, so Bears-like.

Wouldn't a hell-for-leather drive have been a good thing to try in this weak-sister game?

Seventy-seven-second drives can win Super Bowls, you know.

The tension in the locker room belied the great season the Bears already have recorded.

''We don't have any distractions,'' middle linebacker Brian Urlacher told us media folks, ''except from you guys.''

Well, we didn't put the fighting pit bulls in Tank's backyard or the assault rifles in his den.

We didn't fire the shots over the Gurnee neighborhood.

We don't have felon bodyguards, now deceased.

But there was a philosophical point to Urlacher's statement, almost a call for understanding of a brutal and stimulating game that, at its core, is dark, cruel and devastating, and often played by bad men.

''We think that winning the game should be all that matters to our fans,'' Urlacher said.

Forget center Olin Kreutz giving a cheap-shot knee-drop to a downed Bucs player, for instance.

What's a personal foul when a guy could get iced at the Ice Bar?

''In the game, for those 60 minutes, it's just you and the field,'' Urlacher said. ''It's the only thing that gets you away from real life. It's fun. I can't explain it.''

What he was touching on was that real life, in a lot of rudimentary ways, with its rules and its ethics and its responsibilities, sucks.

It must be a hell of thing, then, I suggested to the All-Pro player, to have that game taken away.

Urlacher, clad in a tan cap and massive blue sweatshirt, looked very serious.

''I can't imagine it.''

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