Thursday was one of those days that the Bears will get excited about and they should. In a short week, the team went on the road and beat a division foe.

The win gets the team back to .500 (6-6) with four games left to play. Trying to figure out exactly what this win or this record means is tricky.

Throughout this season, at multiple times, it has been easy to simply write-off 2019 as over. Mitchell Trubisky has looked out of sorts. Matt Nagy has seemed overwhelmed. The Bears' defense has been good, but not dominant enough to make up for some of the offense's shortcomings.

From Week 7 on, looking at the NFC standings was a masochistic endeavor for any Bears fan because it meant looking up at the Vikings and Packers in your own division. Simultaneously, it forced fans to relearn algebra to try and figure out how to overcome at least one of the NFC North teams while keeping an eye on the red hot squads in the NFC West.

The most disappointing part of that exercise was continually looking at the Bears not live up to - and this is important to note - their own expectations.

The beginning of this season was filled with calamity. In games when the defense was stout, the offense was anemic. In games when the offense was clicking, special teams would falter.

In 2018, the Bears stayed healthy and in 2019, they got hit severely with the injury bug. And the whole time, there have been growing questions on whether the head coach of the team was prepared to handle a season filled with dysfunction, after a season filled with relative bliss.

But here we sit…

When the schedule came out, the last four games of the season looked like a relentless gauntlet. Now not so much.

The Cowboys are talented, but find themselves in familiar territory: in disarray. The Chiefs are struggling on defense and Patrick Mahomes has looked almost human after returning from his knee injury. The Packers have a great record and are probably better than the Bears, but no one would say they're unbeatable and for some reason, Nagy, Trubisky, and the Bears' defense has had the Vikings number.

It is unlikely that the Bears run through these last four games with wins, but it is not as daunting of a task as it looked like in September or honestly, even three weeks ago.

Unfortunately, it is possible that even a 10-6 record would not be enough to secure a playoff spot.

A win against a Detroit team playing with a third-string quarterback seems strange to celebrate. And it is concerning Nagy is already sounding as if Trubisky's performance was a harbinger of things to come versus mounting evidence to the contrary.

With the win, the Bears accomplished something that looked impossible in October: making December interesting.

That all goes away with a loss against Dallas, but if they win, it will be a mad dash to the finish instead of long slog to pre-NFL Draft scouting.

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Bears have made December interesting and set up a potential playoff push originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago