Saturday was my daughter Maizee’s 16th birthday. It was also the date of the biggest football game of the last 40 years for crazy Chicago Bears fans like me.

You can probably see where this is going.

Maizee is my spirt animal. I’ve been calling her that for years because she is the one person who gets more than anyone else. We have some seriously deep conversations, and she routinely roasts me better than Nikki Glaser making fun of Gronk.

She even looks a little bit like me, and we are alike in so many ways. Except for one.

Maizee has no idea how I can be such a passionate fan of a football team made up of dozens of players and coaches who do not even know I exist.

That is true despite that fact that our first meaningful moment together was watching the Arizona Cardinals beat the Green Bay Packers in an overtime playoff game, too. It was the day she was born, and I rocked her in the hospital as I watched the game.

I jumped out of the chair and danced around the room as the Cardinals scored the defensive touchdown to walk the game off. I was so happy that my baby girl was born on one of my favorite days — one when the Packers lose out in the playoffs.

Maybe me waking her up by yelling about football she was about 5 hours old is something that left a mark because Maizee has no interest in any sport.

That makes her just like her mother and older sister.

The women in my life do not get my obsession with the Chicago Bears or, to a lesser degree, the Boston Red Sox. They certainly do not understand why I yell and scream at the TV while I watch them.

They do not get why I must watch every single Bears game, even when they are near the end of a losing streak that reached double digits. So, they could not understand why I had to watch the Bears and Packers play in the playoffs on Maizee’s birthday.

They do not get that the Bears are so much more than a football team to me. They are a connection to my childhood and part of my overall identity.

That identity began sometime in the late 1970s. That is when I decided I was going to be just like my hero — my dad — and cheer for the Bears. He was a fan because he loved watching Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers play football.

Likewise, I loved Walter Payton, even though I rarely got to watch him play. I just liked the way his name sounded. His last name is so cool that it made his old-timer first name seem cool, too. I dressed up as him for Halloween at least twice.

I loved the Bears logos, and I loved their colors. My grandma Jean even made me a navy blue, orange and white Afghan. It is still one of my most prized possessions, nearly nine years after she passed.

The Bears started to show signs of life late in the 1983 season, and that meant that we finally got to watch the Bears on television in our area.

The Bears really started to get good in 1984, and they shuffled the way to the Super Bowl title in 1985. They had the Punky QB, the Refrigerator and, of course, Sweetness. Watching that team win and the way that they won hooked me like a gambler who won big the first time he pulled the slot.

For years, it was like I was chasing that feeling I had when I was 11 years old and watching the 1985 Bears.

Being a Bears fan these past 35 years has been difficult, to say the least. We had our years in the 1980s, but things started to really go downhill in 1989. That is when the Packers torture began with the Instant Replay Game, the greatest sports injustice since the 1972 Olympics gold medal basketball game.

The torture really got bad when Brett Favre rolled into the division. It got unbearable when Aaron Rodgers replaced Favre. It was like being handed over from one bully to a much larger and meaner bully.

I watched almost every one of those games, too, and I had to take a ton of crap from Packers fans the whole time. They are the worst, even though they are almost universally nice.

Do you know how bad it is to be looked down upon by people who were fake cheese on their heads?

This season, though, is finally different. The cardiac Bears won the NFC North under first-year head coach Ben Johnson, who seems to hate the Packers as much as I do. The Bears finally have a real quarterback.

But just when it seems like things are good, there stood the Packers, waiting to knock the Bears out of the playoffs like they did when the Bears won the division in 2010. They were ready to ruin the entire season.

They might as well have gone 1-16 if they lost to the Packers in the playoffs. All those come-from-behind wins would be meaningless. The Dec. 20 overtime win over the Packers would have been wiped off the books.

Except, this time the Packers didn’t ruin the season. It just looked like they would when they jumped out to a 21-3 halftime lead. It just looked that way when the Packers led 21-6 after three quarters.

But the Bears pulled off their biggest playoff comeback in franchise history, ending Green Bay’s season with a 31-27 victory.

The way the game went and who they beat just might make this the Bears’ biggest victory since their only Super Bowl win, which was 40 years ago this month. This win exercised all the Packers demons. All of them. It was bigger than the Red Sox making that legendary comeback against the Yankees in 2004.

The win, and how it was won, was just that special. It made me so happy on so many levels, but I can’t make Maizee, her mom or sister see why.

Because of the bad scheduling by the NFL, we took Maizee out to dinner with one of her best friends the night before her birthday. I figured that we’d get cake and ice cream, and we could celebrate while the game was on the next night. I figured that this time I was going to be calm during the game, for a change.

I figured wrong. The game was crazy. I was crazy. I yelled. I cursed. I paced. I celebrated with my son. I was way more of a lunatic than usual during a Bears game.

Had I not been able to watch the game, though, I would have been a billion times worse. I don’t think I could have handle it. The anxiety might have literally killed me.

I know. It doesn’t make sense, but it is true all the same.

On the same night, one of my Bears fans friends had to go to his nephew’s wedding. There was no TV, but people were watching on their phones.

If my nephew was getting married that night, I would have sent him a card.

I could miss big baseball games for family occasions, but not the Bears in the playoffs. Not against Green Bay.

In October of 2008, my brother made the selfish decision to get married and have his wedding reception at the rodeo grounds, where there were no televisions, on the night of Game 6 of the American League Championship Series. The Red Sox were playing, too.

I am a diehard Red So fan, but I missed that game to be at my brother’s side. If he would have gotten married during a Bears-Packers playoff game, I would have sent him a card.

None of my employers could ever afford me during a regular-season Bears game, let alone a playoff game. George Soros could not afford me then.

So, when I saw the times of the wildcard round playoff games, I made a deal with Maizee. If she would not get mad at me for watching the game on her birthday, then I would split the money I made officiating high school basketball games earlier in the day with her.

I thought it was a fair deal, but it wasn’t. A better dad would have been able to miss that game on his daughter’s 16th birthday. I could not.

My spirit animal will forgive me. I know she will. She probably already does, even if she does not share my joy in the Bears slaying those demons.

I just hope someday she will understand why I had to watch that game, even if I cannot quite understand it myself.

— Bill Foley, who would make a great case study for a phycology professor, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.