5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 …

And the ball dropped — from the hands of tackled Atlanta Falcons running back Tyler Allgeier to the wet grass on Soldier Field.

That was it, the final moment of Sunday’s 37-17 Chicago Bears victory, putting the punctuation on the final game of a wildly eventful calendar year for the franchise.

Satisfying? One-thousand percent. Especially for all these Bears who haven’t had many wins this convincing or many surges of success that have generated so much confidence.

The Bears have now won five of their past seven games.

Sunday’s triumph marked their fifth consecutive victory at home.

This is now a feisty football team that is proving capable of taking care of “should win” games.

That’s why, in a jubilant home locker room on New Year’s Eve, there was a celebratory cloud of cigar smoke lingering and a shared energy that the dark days for the team are gone.

“We’re celebrating New Year’s. And a victory,” safety Eddie Jackson said. “It means a lot for us to keep rallying around each other.”

Added tight end Cole Kmet: “I think you can see where this is going. We’ve got some really good pieces. We have a really good team coming together. I really believe that. And I couldn’t have said that in the past.”

Even the always measured and ultra-grounded Matt Eberflus appreciated what his players were feeling and expressing. “Just to get that vibe in there, that feeling of ‘Hey, we can do this,’ is certainly exciting,” Eberflus said.

Sunday’s blowout — the Bears’ second consecutive victory in which they never trailed — had so many people’s fingerprints on it, starting first with Justin Fields, who threw for 268 yards, ran for 45 more and contributed two touchdowns.

There were nine catches — including a 7-yard touchdown catch — sprinkled in from DJ Moore, plus four more interceptions from by spirited Bears defense.

Cairo Santos kicked three field goals. The Bears held possession for more than 37 minutes, racked up 432 total yards and soaked it all in inside a chilly Soldier Field snow globe.

“Felt like a movie,” Fields said.

Perhaps this was a fitting 2023 ending for a team and an organization headed in a positive direction, making undeniable progress on their climb. Yes, there’s still next weekend’s rivalry finale against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field, the game that will complete this Bears season. But on the final day of 2023, the vibes felt so energized, so hopeful and so many miles apart from where the year began.

A look back

Pause for a second. Reflect. Understand all that just happened during a hectic and dizzying 2023 for the Bears, one which started on New Year’s Day in Detroit with a disastrous blowout loss to the resurgent Lions and ended with Sunday’s encouraging romp over the Falcons.

Think about all the arrivals and exits, the unfathomable losses and hope-inducing victories. Most importantly, understand the jump this team has made.

“We’re getting closer and closer,” Jaylon Johnson said.

The Bears are now onto 2024, a Leap Year on the calendar and, quite possibly, a leap year in the team’s championship pursuit. Wouldn’t that be nice?

In many ways, the coming 365 days will prove landmark for the organization, filled with pressure and opportunity and high-stakes decisions that will propel — or perhaps impede — the team’s direction.

But what about the year that just finished, this 2023 roller coaster full of corkscrews and stomach-dropping falls and, lately, a handful of exhilarating moments?

On the 12th day of the year, the Bears hired a new team president and CEO to replace Ted Phillips. Kevin Warren, the new Halas Hall head honcho, officially took over in April and continues vowing to not only redefine expectations and standards in Lake Forest but is working daily to stimulate energized ambition across the organization.

“I want people in this organization in this place in time to understand what we’re trying to achieve,” Warren said last spring. “I want this to be something where 30, 40, 50 years from now, people are asking anyone who was around this, like, ‘What was that like? What was that really like? What made that work?’”

(We’ll save Warren’s stadium mission for another column.)

For now, Warren’s most significant direct report is general manager Ryan Poles. And man, did Poles have himself an eventful 2023. He acknowledged back in the spring how stimulating and exhausting it was to navigate the early parts of an offseason that saw him turn the team’s No. 1 overall pick in the draft into a gift basket of roster-building assets from the Carolina Panthers.

Hello, DJ Moore. Welcome, Darnell Wright. Happy to have you aboard, Tyrique Stevenson.

Oh, plus there’s still a 2025 second-round selection coming from that trade not to mention the prize(s) the Bears can claim with this year’s No. 1 overall pick. Yes, they officially own that selection now, too, thanks to the Panthers’ 14th loss of the season Sunday.

Highs and lows

Poles’ March trade for Moore and that collection of draft picks was the first of three high-profile trades the GM made in 2023 — one a “my bad” and “good riddance” separation from moody receiver Chase Claypool and the other a bold midseason addition of standout pass rusher Montez Sweat.

Both, by almost every account, were huge net positives for Poles and the Bears.

The same couldn’t be said for every game within this regular season, especially the first four, all losses and all carrying a different form of demoralization.

Remember that stunning reality-check Week 1 beatdown from the Green Bay Packers?

What about that missed opportunity the following Sunday in Tampa? Or that 41-10 thrashing from Poles’ old team, the Kansas City Chiefs, on Sept. 24?

Or, yes, the mother of all breakdowns, a Week 4 home loss to the Broncos when the Bears blew a 21-point lead in the final 16 minutes?

That was the first of three brutal fail-from-ahead losses in 2023 in which the Bears squandered double-digit leads in the fourth quarter. (The examination of those setbacks has to be part of the performance reviews of everyone in the days and weeks ahead.)

By mid-October, the Bears’ season seemed dead, the team’s playoff dreams dashed, the fan base’s attention turning far too early to the 2024 draft and, by extension, lighting the fire for a citywide quarterback debate that has only gotten hotter and more intense with each passing week.

The leap Chicago was banking on from Fields in 2023 didn’t happen as envisioned. Fields has made undeniable improvement across so many key areas and that was easily evident Sunday. But there has not been any sort of league-shaking breakthrough either.

Consequently, a fault line has been activated between a contingent of frustrated fans who are ready to move on and the frenzied optimists who have checked the “close enough” box on the starting quarterback while envisioning Fields’ rise to stardom.

Quality control

Last February, Poles said he would have to be “blown away” by a quarterback prospect in the 2023 draft class to pivot off Fields as his QB1. He wasn’t. So he didn’t.

(Bryce Young became a Panther with the No. 1 pick that franchise bought from the Bears. C.J. Stroud went No. 2 to Houston.)

Now, extraordinarily, the Bears again own the No. 1 pick for the 2024 draft and Poles will be pushed into answering the same riddle. Stay the course with Fields? Or take a big swing and gamble on a quarterback prospect in the draft class?

No matter what, the Bears GM will have to continue building up a suddenly competitive roster that featured 10 quality starters Sunday who weren’t part of the organization on New Year’s Day a year ago. That included Moore and Sweat, free agent signees Tremaine Edmunds and T.J. Edwards plus draft picks Darnell Wright and Tyrique Stevenson, who had two interceptions against the Falcons.

Piece by piece, the Bears have become more solid and more dangerous.

‘We all push each other’

Eberflus seemed fully appreciative Sunday of how tightly his team had stuck together in 2023, particularly through all the extreme turbulence they experienced. Most notably, the abrupt late-September resignation from defensive coordinator Alan Williams for what multiple sources indicated were conduct-related reasons created chaos — and right in the middle of the team’s 0-4 start.

While unrelated to Williams’ departure, a failure to meet workplace standards also cost running backs coach David Walker his job on the Wednesday of Week 9, only adding to the commotion inside Halas Hall and an outside perception that Eberflus might be in over his head as the team’s coach.

Yet those pronounced lows and the grit this team showed to pull out of its early tailspin certainly factored into the satisfaction that was flowing inside the Bears locker room Sunday.

“When you go through adversity, when you go through (hardship), it battle tests you,” Eberflus said. “It makes you feel appreciative of what you’re doing right now when you have success. If it was all easy, it would feel like, ‘Oh, no big deal.’ But we know how hard it is to win in the NFL.”

Fields singled out the team camaraderie as fuel for the recent success spike.

“Everybody in this locker room loves each other,” he said. “I think that’s number one. We all push each other to be our best. Win or lose, we all look after one another.”

That stuff matters.

Back to the future

So stop for a second. Just imagine if the Bears can attack this next calendar year with a heightened level of purpose and unity while making another series of significant strides. Might we reach the end of 2024 and be evaluating a playoff contender?

“I really do think you can see this thing coming together,” Kmet said. “I think you see a real football team coming together.”

For the first time in a long time, that sentiment felt so much more legitimate than hopeful. Still, as Jaylon Johnson asserted, the Bears also shouldn’t exaggerate their late-season momentum.

“It’s hard,” he said. “At the end of the day, you want to get into the playoffs. And I feel like that seems kind of far away at this point. But we’ve definitely been putting some things together.”

Step by step, piece by piece, that assembly continues.

Now it’s on to 2024. One way or another, it should be a fascinating year for the Bears. And, somehow, it is set up to be far more eventful than the one that just ended. Imagine that.

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