Courageous, united Bears stick together, hold off Vikings’ mighty second-stringers!

The Bears’ offense struggled to get the ball into the end zone against a team preoccupied with the upcoming playoffs.

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Chicago Bears v Minnesota Vikings

Mitch Trubisky (right) talks with Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins after the Bears’ 21-19 victory Sunday. Cousins, like most Minnesota starters, didn’t play in the game.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

The Bears finished near the bottom of the NFL in offensive production, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize, folks: They led the league in teammates who really, really care about each other.

Coach Matt Nagy preached the camaraderie gospel all year, and it figures to pay off in a big way when the guys share feelings and toast marshmallows at the postseason camping trip.

As far as the whole football side of things, which apparently isn’t as important as it used to be, the Bears have a ton of issues.

Many of those issues were on display Sunday in a 21-19 victory over a playoff-bound Vikings team that was sitting almost all of its starters. It says something definitive about quarterback Mitch Trubisky and the Bears’ floundering offense that they had trouble scoring touchdowns against players whom you’d know only with the help of a roster card and facial-recognition technology.

Issues? Nagy continued to call third-down pass plays short of the first-down marker. Trubisky continued to throw mostly short, safe passes. The offensive line was terrible. And the offense couldn’t score a passing touchdown if its collective lives depended on it. All of this against an opponent whose attention was on the upcoming playoffs.

Before the season began, the Bears thought they’d be in the playoffs, too. In fact, Nagy was so sure of it, he sat out most of his starters in the preseason, figuring it was more important to keep his players healthy than it was to have them comfortable with each other in game conditions.

So to sum up, the Vikings sat out their starters as if it were the last preseason game, and the Bears played their starters as if it were the playoffs.

And the Bears struggled nonetheless to get the ball into the end zone.

There was something appropriate about all of that, though if you asked me what it was, I’m not sure I could say. That the reason the Bears finished 8-8 is because they’re not very good? Quite possibly.

What can be said with certainty is that the offense was a mess from the beginning of the season to the end and that if Trubisky can’t have success against the Vikings’ junior-varsity team, perhaps it’s because he’s a JV quarterback.

“We’ve got some special guys in the locker room,’’ Trubisky said after the game.

OK, Mitch.

A .500 record would be acceptable if it weren’t for the fact that the Bears believed they were good enough to go to the Super Bowl after going 12-4 last year. And the story of 8-8 was damning. They beat bad teams, and they lost to good teams. That was the Bears’ 100th season. That and a shockingly unproductive offense.

They scored their lone touchdown against Minnesota on the first drive of the third quarter, thanks to a running game that had been criminally neglected in Nagy’s pass-happy offense this season. They ran eight times in a nine-play, 75-yard drive that ended when David Montgomery, playing the role of party bus, carried about 10 players into the end zone with him.

Who’s most culpable for this season? Hands down, it’s general manager Ryan Pace for drafting Trubisky over Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson. But Nagy gets a slice of the blame for going so all-in on his beleaguered quarterback. There was a running game in there somewhere, one that should have included Trubisky, but Nagy couldn’t see it, what with the blinders he wore all year.

Nagy has a major stubborn streak, and it’s not very attractive. When Trubisky was stuffed for no gain on fourth-and-one late in the third quarter, all I could think was that it would confirm to Nagy that running the ball was indeed the work of the devil and that his backs were done for the day.

I don’t know if the Bears would’ve won more games if they had been run-centric. I just know they can’t win if they’re Mitch-centric.

It took Eddy Pineiro’s 22-yard field goal in the waning seconds for the Bears to win a game against some scrubs. That’s all you need to know about this game.

Well, there was this, too: I have never heard of Vikings running back Mike Boone, but I think he just rushed for 1,000 yards against the Bears’ top-10 defense. Never mind that, Nagy said.

“I’m appreciative of the players and coaches fighting until the very end, to literally the very end,’’ he said. “We have guys that fight.’’

If only caring and fighting were significant offensive statistics.

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