Charlie Brown really wants to kick that ball. It is all he wants to do.

He wants it so bad that it hurts.

So, Charlie gets a long, running start toward the ball, which is being held by his nemesis Lucy. This time, he is really going to give it a boot.

Suddenly, though, Lucy pulls the ball up. Chuck’s big swing misses, and he ends up on his back, hurting and humiliated. 

Good grief.

It happens every time. That blockhead should see it coming, but he cannot help but to trust Lucy. He just really wants to kick the ball.

That is exactly what it is like to be a fan of the Chicago Bears. We want the Bears to be good, and every time we think they are going to put it all together and make us happy and proud, they pull the rug out on us.

They leave us hurting and humiliated.

While I professed my Bears fandom in the 1970s, I really got addicted to the Bears during the 1985 season. That season was a dream for this 11-year-old fifth grader. Every Sunday was pure bliss as the Bears shuffled to the Super Bowl title.

It was like a gambler hitting the jackpot on his first pull of the lever on the slot machine. He is addicted for life.

The next 38 years, however, have been one Charlie Brown kick and miss after another.

Being a Bears fan has been so much torture. No, it wasn’t quite like being a fan of the Browns and the Jets back when those teams were horrible year after year. It is even harder.

Going into the season, you just knew the Browns and Jets were going to stink. So, fans in Cleveland and New York were prepared for the eventual failure of their teams.

The Bears, though, periodically gave us some hope with some out-of-the blue good seasons. They gave us reason to believe before dumping us on our behinds.

After the Bears fired Mike Ditka following the 1992 season, Chicago went into a nearly decade-long run of suckery. They won a road playoff game over the Vikings on Jan. 1, 1995. Other than that, they Bears were hardly relevant in the 1990s.

In 2001, the Bears went 13-3 and won the NFC Central, which is what we called the Black and Blue Division back then. But Chicago lost its first playoff game at home against the Eagles — mainly because Eagles lineman Hugh Douglas took out Bears quarterback Jim Miller with a cheap shot.

The next year, I was sure the Bears would be back.

Wrong.

The 2002 Bears stunk. So did the Bears of 2003 and 2004.

In 2005 and 2006, the Bears did something very rare. They went to the playoffs in back-to-back years. They lost to the Panthers in the first round in 2005, but they went all the way to the Super Bowl in 2006.

Even though the Bears lost to the Colts in the Miami rain, I was still excited going into the 2007 season. But gain, the Bears stunk for the next three season.

There is no middle ground with the Bears. They either win the division and get us excited, or they are painfully bad.

In 2010, they were again on top of the division, this time the NFC North. Like in 2001, it was a surprise season filled with magical moments.

The Packers — thanks to a cheap shot to take out Bears quarterback Jay Cutler — stomped on that magic in the NFC Championship game. That January defeat was the one of four losses to the Packers in the calendar year 2011 as the Bears pulled out the rug on us again.

Chicago fired Lovie Smith and Bears fans had to go in hiding during the embarrassing years of Marc Trestman and John Fox.

But Matt Nagy rode to the rescue in 2018. Running fun gadget plays with fun little names like “Santa’s Sleigh,” the Bears went 12-4 and won the North.

With their best defense since their Super Bowl runs, the Bears looked like true contenders until Cody Parkey doinked that game-winning field goal off the goal posts. Twice. 

That was just the start of something good, we thought. We were sure of it. We knocked on the door in 2018, and we were going to kick the damn thing down in 2019.

We were excited all offseason. We couldn’t wait for the end of summer to see the Bears roll to the Super Bowl.

Wrong again.

Starting with a season-opening loss to the Packers, the Bears started stinking again. They have stunk ever since.

We thought Trestman and Nagy were rock bottom. We thought wrong.

Now we have Matt Eberflus as head coach, and he makes Trestman look like Abe Gibron. The wins are so few and far between.

These are the cruelest years off all. The wins are so few that we get our hopes up for a winning streak every time they get a single victory. We completely forgot what it feels like to win a single regular-season game.

Maybe it is because we are so desperate to believe. Or maybe it was the excitement of drafting Justin Fields. Whatever it was, we were so excited this season. It didn’t matter that the Bears posted the worst record in the league last year.

This year was going to be a good one. Offseason pundits loved the Bears trade of the No. 1 pick. Some were saying Fields would be the MVP. 

We couldn’t wait.

Then the Packers thumped the Bears in the season opener, and Chicago lost its first four games. Oh no, we suck again.

Under Eberflus, we seem to get the rug pulled out on us even more. The latest was after Fields threw for eight touchdowns in two games, and the Bears actually won one of those games, pasting the Commanders on an Amazon Thursday night.

Here we go.

Then they couldn’t even beat a horrible Vikings team, which was missing Justin Jefferson, in Chicago. Fields looks terrible, and then he got hurt. Just 10 days after they loved him, Bears fans want Fields traded. They already have plans for Caleb Williams, whom they will hate in two years if the Bears are able to draft him.

Could it finally be rock bottom? It has to be because here comes Tyson Bagent to the rescue. He’s the quarterback of the future. He’s tough and confident. He has to be; his name is Tyson.

He has the best tattoo game this side of Caleb Bellach. The kid has some moxie. He has the confidence of Jim McMahon.

Bagent is an undrafted rookie out of Shepherd University, a Division II college you probably didn’t know existed in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Bears fans think they just got a steal like the 49ers did with Brock Purdy.

We got the next Tom Brady, but without the smarm and pretense. 

Bagent looked really good in his first start, and the Bears destroyed the Raiders on Sunday. We can already envision multiple Super Bowl titles with the Tatted QB.

This kid is going to be the biggest thing in Chicago since Fridge Perry. Here we go.

This time, Lucy is going to let Charlie Brown kick that ball.

— Bill Foley, whose big, round head has been compared to Charlie Brown since Day 1, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74. Listen to the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.