Hey, it was a weekend of football upsets in college and the NFL, wasn't it?

The Bears were just trying to join in the shocking fun, that's all, along with the likes of Oregon State over USC, Mississippi over Florida and the Chiefs over the Broncos.

Around here, beating the Eagles would be bigger than all of them combined, plus you could include Michigan over Wisconsin.

Kyle Orton over Donovan McNabb in a quarterback competition? Bears offensive coordinator Ron Turner out-scheming Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Johnson? The Bears holding off the Eagles in the fourth quarter?

Of course, and the next thing you'll tell me is it's Sept. 29 and both the Cubs and the White Sox still have a chance to play each other in the World Series.

They must, considering the Bears did beat the Eagles 24-20 Sunday night in Soldier Field.

OK, so beating Philadelphia isn't exactly like the Giants beating the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. But these Bears aren't those Giants quite yet either, are they?

The real stickler for the Bears was that fourth-quarter phobia thing inflicting them. They play the final few minutes of a game like rodeo clowns trying to perform heart surgery.

"It takes an entire team effort to win these games," Orton said, "and that's what happened tonight."

Maybe we should have expected as much. The game was on Sunday night and three weeks earlier the Bears beat the Colts on a Sunday night.

Or maybe the Bears simply are good enough to compete with suspected Super Bowl contenders like the Eagles and Colts.

No, no, no, that's not to say the Bears are good enough to contend for the Super Bowl. They're just good enough to play with teams good enough to get to the Super Bowl on any given Sunday night.

At the start of the fourth quarter the Eagles had the Bears exactly where they wanted them. The Bears led 21-17 and couldn't hold a lead like that, could they?

It reached the point where the Chicago Park District crew working Soldier Field tried to help by freezing the numbers on the scoreboard with 13:15 to play and the Bears leading by a point.

Didn't work. The football gods repaired the board and to win the Bears had to repair their late lapses.

Lo and behold, on fourth-and-goal at the 1-yard line Alex Brown stopped Correll Buckhalter. Then the offense helped by running out most of the remaining time.

When the clock ran out, the Bears had an improbable victory and an even more improbable 2-2 record.

Go figure.

"It's a good step for our team," Bears coach Lovie Smith said. "We wanted to finish this first quarter (of the season) on a high note before going on the road."

The Bears clearly still are trying to figure out what they are. They're trying to figure out what Orton is after his team won games against teams quarterbacked by McNabb and Peyton Manning. They're trying to figure out whether their defense is the one that blew late leads two straight weeks or blew the Eagles away on that decisive play at the goal line.

But what isn't difficult to figure is 2 and 2 equals a pretty decent first quarter of the Bears' 2008 schedule.

You know, speaking of upsets.

mimrem@dailyherald.com