A recent online poll showed Wisconsin football fans were evenly split between the Bears and the Colts.

This is deeply disturbing.

Nearly two decades ago a newspaper columnist wrote, "Good Wisconsin boys grew up hating the Chicago Bears. Good Wisconsin boys would watch their fathers watch the Packers and Bears play on television and their dads would snarl, 'I hate the Bears!'"

Truer words were never written (although the columnist neglected to mention good Wisconsin moms and daughters grew up feeling the same way, if not more so.)

This was certainly the case in my home, where my dad, a usually reserved social studies teacher, would take to his recliner as the family gathered in anticipation of the moment when he would jump at the TV set with a wrathful look on his face and yell between gritted teeth, "Give 'em the meat hook!"  

 

To this day I'm not exactly sure what the "meat hook" technique is, but even as a child I knew it was a violent, bloody, and -- outside the confines of a Packers-Bears game -- possibly criminal act. (I'd like to think it was invented by Nitschke for that moment when Dikta came hobbling across the middle.)  If dad's histrionics were any indication, it involved a swift hooking motion around the neck of an unsuspecting Bear to upend the player like a dressed-out pig in a Green Bay meatpacking factory. And when a Bear was waylaid by a Packer, it seemed like dad would wear a satisfied grin all the way to his next confession with our parish priest.

Another household cheer involved the tearing of a certain body part, but I cannot go into detail about that for this column.

A few weeks ago I had the misfortune of being at a Wisconsin Dells water park during first round of the NFL playoffs - misfortune because hoards of Illinoisances were gathered around the TVs while their unattended children deposited Band Aids and nose mucus into the water. At least the Bear game kept our remarkably hairy neighbors out of the water, and that goes for their men, too.

As Sexy Rexy (huh?) led his team to another lucky victory, the Bear fans lifted their knuckles from the pavement, wiped the sweat from their oversized frontal lobes and celebrated in a resounding chorus of Neanderthal grunts.

It was an oddly inspiring moment, because I believed Chicago's slapstick run to the Super Bowl would resurrect Wisconsin's time-honored family values in living rooms across the land.

My sixteen month-old son, for example, is named after his grandfather, and by this Sunday he will have the "meat hook" move mastered like a good and true Wisconsin boy.

Mike Bie's most cherished possession is a ticket stub from the 1989 "Instant Replay" game (Packers 14, Bears 13).