Something appears to have snapped, in a good way, inside Halas Hall: “This team is still building,” said safety Eddie Jackson in the wake of his second game-tipping pick-6 in as many weeks. “Coach told us we’re not the hunted no more; we became the hunter.”

That this was the fifth straight victory for a team with a new head coach is hugely significant in itself; the reason head coaches get to be “new” is because the team hiring them typically was or was playing bad enough to get the preceding coach fired.

The Bears (8-3) weren’t able to defeat the Lions twice in the span of the last five years. With Thursday’s result they did it twice in the span of 11 days. They were good enough to beat the Lions using a No. 2 quarterback. For the past five years they weren’t able to beat the Lions with a No. 1 quarterback. The 2016 victory was led by Brian Hoyer; maybe it’s some kinda backup-QB thing… .

Anyway, to suggest that the defense stepped up in the absence of Mitchell Trubisky is insulting to the defense; it implies that there was a step that the players hadn’t taken previously. No, they simply played to their seed on Thursday (the two takeaways actually were sort of an underachieving day for a unit that had three or more in seven of its previous 10 games, but who’s quibbling?) – exactly how an elite defense plays completely irrespective of who’s playing on offense.

That would constitute a “statement.”

So is scoring no fewer than 23 points in 10 of 11 games. So is just winning five straight games in the NFL.

When is the last time the Bears were the predators of the NFC North? Obviously not since Lance Briggs, Charles Tillman, Brian Urlacher and associates, and not even then really, looking at the reality that they’d won the division just once since their 2006 Super Bowl season. And the year they managed that (2010), they couldn’t best the Green Bay Packers at home when it mattered most and the Packers copped a Lombardi Trophy.

But added significance comes in with stacking wins, not because of some vague notion of “momentum,” but because wins build confidence (and vice versa), and it is that burgeoning confidence that is the real source of any carryover/momentum. Believing is everything. A team that thinks it’s the hunter and no longer the hunted brings something out on game days that hunteds can’t and don’t. Once a team or even segments of one start to doubt, the negative becomes self-fulfilling. “Here we go again” is a very real negative reaction within a team that seems to always either have something go wrong or know deep down that it can’t overcome its missteps.

The Bears trailed the Lions until 40 seconds before halftime. They trailed entering the fourth quarter, a situation that they have been spotty about overcoming in the past. In each case, they responded with a go-ahead touchdown, one by the offense, one by the defense, in a game in which they were outgained 223-103 in the second half.

Detroit having beaten the Bears nine of the 10 times they’d met over the past five years, recent history required that the Bears defeat the Lions not just at home, but also in Ford Field on Thanksgiving Day. That was the “statement,” that home-field advantage was not the difference.

Hunters, not the hunteds.