Heidi Stevens: The joy from this Chicago Bears' run is about more than just football. It's about remembering what we share

Heidi Stevens, Tribune News Service on Jan 15, 2026

Published in Lifestyles

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Win or lose, this Chicago Bears season has been an absolute blast. Unexpected. Joyful. Resilience in action. A comeback story for the ages. A foundation to build upon.

A couple days after the Bears sent the Green Bay Packers packing, I bonded with a guy on the sidewalk about Matthew Stafford’s cold-weather stats for the Rams. The week prior, I bonded with a FedEx driver about the cost of tickets. For those prices, she suggested, the players should offer lap dances. For that idea, I suggested, she should be team president.

Also thanks to that victory over the Packers, Chicago got to know Brandon Martinez, aka Cheese Grater Guy, who appeared on screens across America grating a block of Parmesan he smuggled into Soldier Field.

“I nicked two of my fingers,” Martinez told Block Club Chicago reporter Mack Liederman, who profiled our new hero. “But yeah, I’d do it again.”

Martinez, born and raised on the Southwest Side, bought tickets with the money he earned working overtime at his job operating blenders for antifreeze and airplane deicer at a chemical plant.

“On the way to the tailgate Saturday, Martinez picked up beers and a $8.99 cheese grater with a plastic cover from Jewel-Osco,” Liederman reported. “Martinez was also strapped with four cheese chunks that his wife put in Ziploc bags and stuffed into his pockets.”

Absolute legend.

All of this comes on the heels of the Wiener's Circle offering free hot dogs if Caleb Williams scored four touchdowns against Dallas. (He did.) And free hot dogs if coach Ben Johnson took his shirt off after a win over the Eagles. (He did.)

I posted on Facebook the other day about some of the joy this is bringing me and a friend commented, “I don’t know how anyone can give a crap about football right now.”

Extremely fair point.

Millions of Americans are watching their health insurance skyrocket to unaffordable levels, even as grocery prices rise faster than at any time since 2022.

Masked federal agents are terrorizing communities and destroying families and going door to door demanding papers.

Renee Nicole Good is dead. Her children, now motherless, are living through the compound trauma of having her character assassinated by our elected leaders.

The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer consider the number of human lives saved in its pollution regulations — only the cost to business.

The FBI just searched the home of a Washington Post journalist, seizing laptops, a phone and a smartwatch during their search.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is policing Smithsonian content and flipping off auto workers and stoking conflict around the globe.

Football feels pretty flimsy.

I replied on Facebook with my favorite Dan Savage quote, which I’ve shared here before:

“Anyone who tells you that making time for joy is a distraction or a betrayal has no idea what they’re talking about. During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon and we danced all night. And it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

But I think it’s a little more than that.

The joy is what we’re fighting for, absolutely. The joy is why we’re here. I did not give birth so my children could pick a tribe. So they could divide and conquer. So they could feel outrage and despair and indignation. Your parents didn’t either.

We are here to feel wonder and witness beauty and create meaning and cherish the people who love us, and to love them back with intention and gratitude.

And we’re also here, I believe, to use our energy and voices and power to make sure wonder and beauty and meaning and love — along with safety and dignity and human rights — are available to everyone.

We’re not just fighting for the dance, in other words. We’re fighting so everyone gets to dance.

I promise I’m getting back to football in a minute.

I think we fight for those things more effectively, more fervently, more authentically, when we know each other. When we are connected to each other. When we experience the same things. When we love some of the same things.

Art does that. Books do that. Nature does that. And sports do that.

They’re not distractions. They’re paths to understanding one another. They’re invitations to talk to one another. They’re ways to understand the human condition.

Is that a lot to attach to a shirtless coach and a cheese-grating fan and a conversation on a sidewalk about Matthew Stafford’s pass rating in snow? Maybe. Do I believe it with my whole heart? Definitely.

We need things that remind us we’re all part of the same story. The one we're still writing.