A game I like to play

Very often in the sports [section] of the newspaper, reporters [clean up] the quotes from players, who are often too exhausted or excited to [use proper grammer]. This quote appeared in Rick Morrissey's column about the Bear's win over Carolina on Sunday.

Somebody asked cornerback Nathan Vasher how, if given the opportunity and a laptop computer, he would write the story of the Bears' 13-3 victory over the Panthers on Sunday.

"Bears win," said Vasher, clearly not the kind of writer who gets paid by the word.

Earlier in a postgame scrum with reporters, he had said the Bears were "the real deal," and so I asked him whether this victory might finally have erased some of the doubts about his much-doubted team.

"I don't know," he said. "How do you feel about it?"

That's the question I'd been asking myself each of the last six Sundays. And mostly what I had felt about the Bears was acute uncertainty.

But Sunday rolled around, and the Bears went out and put a defensive beating on the Panthers, who have been picked as a possible Super Bowl team. And I paused a second before answering Vasher, as if I had to hear the words in my head before I uttered them to him.

"I think you're pretty good," I finally told Vasher.

"There you go," he said. "Here we are. We're just trying to erase one [doubter] at a time."

I like to guess what the missing words are. I really hope he said "hater".