CHICAGO — Chicago Cubs fans can tell you all about hope—how to embrace it, how to find sustenance in it and, as an added bonus, how to make paper dolls out of it once the season goes to pieces.

But what are Bears fans supposed to do with hope? Close their eyes and ignore the fact that Rex Grossman just signed a one-year contract to stay with the team?

Are they supposed to hope Grossman suddenly figures out how to play quarterback in the NFL?

Or that Cedric Benson suddenly plays the way they might expect from a high draft pick and a man who pocketed a $16 million signing bonus?

Or that the common refrain about Brian Urlacher won't be, "Well, at least he's young at heart"?

Man, that's a whole bunch of hope. That's the kind of hope that should be subjected to a drug test.

It's February, when Bears fans are supposed to be healing from last year's open-heart surgery by thinking good thoughts about next season. But where exactly are they supposed to put their hope?

In the idea that if the Giants can win the Super Bowl, so can the Bears? Trust me, you will be hearing that tempting thought again and again from the Bears themselves. It's not fool's gold, but it is incredibly presumptuous. It implies that, (A) the Bears have the talent and the coaching the Giants had last season and that, (B) the Bears have the kind of ability and resolve New York did when it won 11 straight games on the road, including its upset of the previously unbeaten Patriots in the Super Bowl.

Hey, I'd just like to see the Bears stop the Vikings' Adrian Peterson once.

Have you seen any indication that Grossman is capable of putting together the sort of stretch Eli Manning did for the Giants at the end of the season? Have you seen Grossman play well in a string of important, pressure-packed games?

No you haven't, unless you are experimenting with the drug-fueled kind of hope again.

If you thought last season was tough, when the Bears couldn't put together a two-game winning streak until the end of the year, this off-season could turn out to be worse. The only thing that kept people going last year was the Bears' contention that 2007 was a sad, unfortunate fluke and that good times were right around the corner.

With the recent re-signing of Grossman, that's going to take quite a leap of faith right now. The status looks very much quo right now. Actually, the status is woe.

The Bears want you to believe in them. It's a tough, tough go right now.

The most important position on the football field is quarterback. If the Bears had had a good quarterback in 2006, they might have won the Super Bowl. But they didn't. They started Grossman. So it's kind of hard to invest a lot of hope in the 2008 Bears knowing he'll battle Kyle Orton for the starting job.

While Grossman is a declarative sentence (and not a positive one), the Bears' best player is a question mark. The question is this: Is Urlacher the phenomenal player he used to be, or are we seeing the inevitable physical decline of someone who has donated his body to the science of hitting other people?

Meanwhile, the Bears' front office is threatening to get busy, a scary proposition. The team needs to find a quarterback in the draft. Would it be possible for them to outsource the decision-making process to, say, Green Bay and maybe get the next Brett Favre?

"There are a lot of moving parts right now, a lot of plates in the air," general manager Jerry Angelo said. "... We feel good that our plan is solid. A little luck wouldn't hurt anything. There's going to be change. We're trying to minimize it."

Two things. Hoping for luck to strike is never a good sign. And after what happened last year, when the offense was unproductive and the defense slipped, minimizing change might not be the most prudent course to take.

When your best receiver is Bernard Berrian, when he's inconsistent and when he's expecting big money, it's not a good thing.

Other than that, happy days are here again.

In the case of Cubs fans, hope is a given and it is written on the heart in permanent marker. For them, "wait until next year" is a casual, matter-of-fact utterance, along with "please pass the potatoes" and "Junior did what to the car?"

For the people who follow the Bears, "wait until next year" doesn't sound like hope. It sounds like a threat.