At the bitter cold end, there were newspapers and garbage bags swirling on the turf at Soldier Field.
Mike Tomczak was left in that mess, mopping up the remnants of the Chicago football season with only a few thousand Bear weather fans left as witnesses. What they saw may have been the end of more than just a game.
The San Francisco 49ers` 28-3 victory over the Bears Sunday sent the visitors to Super Bowl XXIII against Cincinnati Jan. 22 in Miami. The home team goes into hibernation for the winter.
It was the third straight season the Bears have lost a home playoff game, a record unequaled in league history.
It was also the second time in five seasons the Bears have been kept from the Super Bowl by the 49ers, and the defeats were similar enough to be the start and finish of the same story.
In 1985, when San Francisco won 23-0, the Bears used the score to measure how far they were from a summit they reached in another year. Four years later, despite a season of surprising achievement, the Bears can only see the loss to the 49ers as a measure of their decline.
Not even a day made for Bears, with temperatures in the teens, a wind chill of minus-26 and winds up to 30 miles an hour, was enough to revive the fires of Super Bowl fever.
”It was the coldest weather I`ve ever played in,” said 49ers defensive back Ronnie Lott, peeling off two layers of underwear.
”Yeah,” chimed in teammate Darryl Pollard, ”but now we`re going to the bikinis and the sunshine.”
The Bears, whose stars are no longer young, could have used some of that warmth to nurse their battered bodies.
Players like Mike Singletary, Dan Hampton and Keith Van Horne, all more than 30 years old, were in the trainer`s room more than 45 minutes after the game, hoping ice would ease the pain. Jim McMahon, who has been tearing himself to pieces since he stuck a fork in his eye as a kid, used the trainer`s room as an escape.
McMahon returned as the Bears` starting quarterback and had the wind knocked out of his body and his sails. He was replaced by Tomczak in the fourth period and last seen dodging the media that had helped turn him into a multimillionaire.
Joe Montana, the 49ers` quarterback, made whipped puppies of a Bears defense that once barked like junkyard dogs. It was a 49ers rookie, Danny Stubbs, making the woofing noises as he headed into the locker room with a Super Bowl XXIII cap in his hand.
The Bears went out not with a woof but an oof, the sound of a team flattened by the opposition.
Their locker room was quiet. Players and press stepped around the empty platform set up earlier by CBS to do the postgame show in the winners` locker room.
Mike Ditka came into his postgame press conference, gave a brief statement and then refused to take questions. An hour later, he was surrounded by security men as he moved quickly to cover the 10 yards between the head coach`s office and a waiting limousine of substantial length. Would Hemingway have called that disgrace under pressure?
”This is no time to look back on our whole season,” center Jay Hilgenberg was saying. ”There should be no rush to overanalyze this. They were just a better team today.”
The 49ers ran faster, passed better, hit harder. It was Bears forced to leave the field after contact-McMahon when he was crushed in the second quarter by Kevin Fagan, running back Neal Anderson when he was tackled by Jeff Fuller.
The team from the West Coast was the tough guys.
”We didn`t want to come in here and let the weather or anything intimidate us,” Lott said.
The brutal cold kept only 2,116 from using their tickets, while 64,830 were numbed into silence by the lack of things to cheer about and a wind that swirled through Soldier Field.
Snow blew in during an early delay for replay consultation, but it did not last. Instead, as darkness fell, the wind kicked up the sideline markings into white dust devils.
Hampton and Steve McMichael and Al Harris and James Thornton and a few other Bears defied the weather by wearing short sleeves, but it was false bravado this time.
A few years ago, the young and brazen Bears were enough to create a climate of fear in the opposition, no matter what they wore. Sunday, anything they put on would have seemed only another style of the emperor`s new clothes.
