LAKE FOREST, Ill. — Someone asked Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Poles if he ever worried about how Ben Johnson would handle success.The first-year head coach led the Bears to their first playoff win in 15 years, after all. There might have been a little mystery, at least to those who don’t know him well.“No,” Poles told The Athletic in his office last month, “because it’s always about this massive goal, ambitious goal — it’s always going to be out there.”One trait that separates his coach is the ability to realize each year is its own chapter, that it’s going to be a different team. And Johnson has made sure everyone in the building gets on board.“I appreciate his leadership on that because that mentality allows you to, I think, keep stacking year after year after year,” Poles said. “Because no one’s satisfied.”Expectations for the Bears' D-line in 2026Kevin Fishbain and Dan WiedererThe son of a coach who has been a coach in the NFL since 2012, Johnson didn’t necessarily have a mentor who showed him how to react to a season-ending loss. He didn’t have a specific experience that led him to set the tone from the start: that 2026 would be different and that resting on the laurels of a division title wouldn’t do anyone any good.“I recognize that last year was a cool season. OK? It was for the players, for the staff, for the city,” Johnson told The Athletic. “I recognize that, and I don’t want to downplay that. That was an incredible experience, something that I will never forget.“At the same time, I also know recent history in Chicago has been, you can have a flash-in-the-pan season, and then the next season it (disappears). You know? We don’t want that. Nobody wants that.”That’s been Poles’ goal since he arrived in 2022 — sustain success. Sure, it’s every GM’s ambition, but Poles also studied up on his new team when he arrived. He saw a franchise that hadn’t had back-to-back playoff seasons in what’s now been 20 years.Now he has a head coach who certainly has the play-calling acumen to end that drought as well as the leadership qualities.“He does not have the mentality of it just rolls to the next year and things just happen the way they did a year prior,” Poles said. “So that desire to be great, reinvent ourselves, create the identity each and every year, that to me is the part where I really believe we’re in a good spot.”Poles said he felt Johnson’s message “went through the locker room immediately.” He noticed a commitment from the building. More players worked out at Halas Hall during the downtime than Poles had seen before. He’d see social media posts of teammates traveling with quarterback Caleb Williams to get in extra throwing sessions.“There really was no space for satisfaction of winning a playoff game or almost winning a divisional game or being close to a championship,” he said, “and that was my biggest fear because it’s been so long that you would have some people take a deep breath like, ‘Oh, you know, we’re OK now.’“(Johnson) nipped that immediately and you felt it go through the whole organization, which was awesome.”The season opener is Sunday on the road against the Carolina Panthers, the official start of the 2026 season and the moment the page has truly been turned. Johnson has generally not been interested in entertaining questions about last season. What happened against the Los Angeles Rams in the divisional round of the playoffs won’t affect what happens against the Panthers on Sunday.That tone was set after a cold night full of emotions in January.One day after the Bears lost to the Rams, Johnson offered the message of reality to his team.“We go back to square one,” he told them. “It’s back to the bottom again, and we got to build this thing back up.”Johnson said he’ll “never forget” the two home playoff games. “Just the energy, the vibe — you could feel that,” he said last January after the overtime defeat.But he wouldn’t linger on it, and he wouldn’t let his players, either.Minutes after Williams’ final pass was picked off, creating the opportunity for the Rams’ game-winning field goal, tight end Cole Kmet had already refocused his mind.“It starts all over,” he said after the game. “It’s 0-0, and it’s gonna be twice as hard to get to this point, you know? … To just think that it’s just gonna happen again, that’s very wishful thinking, very wishful.”Seven months later, Kmet reflected on the experience he felt as a rookie, joining the Bears in 2020 and hearing players still talk about 2018. Two years is a long time in the NFL, yet that wild-card loss to the Philadelphia Eagles still stung in the building.A lot of “what could have been” from the team’s previous division title still permeated.Cole Kmet’s touchdown reception to force overtime against the Rams won’t be forgotten by Bears fans, but Kmet and the team have moved on. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)When the Bears traveled to Cincinnati for a joint practice last month, Kmet noticed how much the Bengals’ defense changed in one offseason, a perfect example of the message Johnson is sending.“You’ve got to understand how this league’s structured as they want seven to eight, nine new teams to be new playoff teams each and every year,” Kmet said. “It’s the reality of it. So when (Johnson) says that stuff, like to me, that rings true.”The Bears, for example, have 20 players on their Week 1 53-man roster who weren’t part of things at Halas Hall last season. They can’t speak to how exhilarating the season was, or how disappointing the end was.Some coaches might use a spring and summer to put together a kicking competition to make sure a playoff miss won’t happen again. But Johnson didn’t spend all offseason rewatching Williams’ interception and wondering how close they were to the NFC Championship Game. That wouldn’t have been productive.As much as the interception still “burns,” Williams told a small group of reporters, and “still bothers me today,” he followed his coach. He moved on.“Obviously when you’re reading a book, you don’t forget the last page,” Williams said. “So you remember the page and it helps for the pages to come after and what’s going to happen at the end of the book. Like Ben said and like Ben has been saying, we’re on to the next and we’re going to try to focus on being able to this year get past that game and go further than we did last year.”Johnson is never satisfied. He has lofty goals. He is hypercompetitive, but not in the mindset of obsessing over a loss from the previous season — instead, it’s making sure that no one is assuming a return to that playoff environment is a given.The idea of a “lull” can’t happen under his watch.Wide receiver Kalif Raymond was with the Detroit Lions with Johnson and head coach Dan Campbell. They won back-to-back division titles together.“You win a division, people are gonna play harder against good teams,” Raymond said. “It always happens. … I mean it’s just a part of the game; it is part of human nature. And it’s part of being a great coach to be like, ‘Hey, man, there’s a lull if you get trapped in that.’ But more importantly, you can always use this from a mental perspective.”Quarterbacks coach J.T. Barrett was also with those winning Lions teams, and he won plenty as a quarterback at Ohio State.“We’re still hunting, but at the end of the day having that mentality like, ‘Hey, what you’ve done doesn’t matter anymore. You still have to go out there and rebuild your reputation, your identity as a team, and what you want to do,’” Barrett said. “And so I think that’s our game, and that’s just how it works.”Guard Jonah Jackson, another former Lion, looked at Johnson’s turn-the-page lesson as pragmatic. You can’t change the past, he said. But it can still fuel you.“Things like that in games where you’re right there have only made us better and made us more hungry for what’s to come,” he said.It’s striking how seldom the interception has popped up in any conversations. The miraculous touchdown to Kmet no longer became a talking point, either, especially after the veteran tight end said in April, “I have to remind people we lost the freakin’ game. But yeah, that was a cool moment for sure, but hopefully next time we pull off the win there.”Johnson wants 2025 to have been the start of something, not the end of a one-season wonder, the way 2001 and 2018 were in Chicago.“I think he’s made no bones about it; the goal here is to win a Super Bowl,” offensive coordinator Press Taylor said. “And the goal here is to win many Super Bowls and be that organization. So that’s kind of just the endless pursuit. If we didn’t do that, we fell short, let’s keep going.”It’s toeing the line of remembering how it ended but not dwelling on it.“I’m not a person who holds onto those moments where I’m stuck in a rut or anything like that,” Williams said. “It happens. It’s going to sting. Every time it comes back up or every time you see it. … But it doesn’t get me into a funk of, ‘Can’t do it. Won’t be able to do it.’ Or if it shows up again, we’re going to shy away from the moment. … We’ll turn the page.”Philosophies don’t win championships. No analytics can project how Johnson’s emphasis on turning the page will affect the team’s chances in 2026. But it’s another example of the coach’s intense focus on winning and his ability to get buy-in from everyone in Halas Hall.“We want to consistently do what we did a year ago, to where we are making waves, we’re putting the league on notice, where we are playing in the postseason, memorable games like that,” Johnson said. “That’s what we want to build and become, and it was great to taste that a year ago.“And yet, if we sit all offseason thinking that it just happens … No, we’re resetting it back to square one, and we have to build our way back up.”