The sharpness of the emotion still sits with Mike Brown. It surprised him, really. How deep it was, how raw and how hollow. In what was, in so many ways, a celebratory week for the NFL franchise Brown had grown up with and lifted to great heights, the Bears' trip to Super Bowl XLI in early 2007 ultimately left him empty.

A two-time All-Pro, Brown spent the final 10 games of 2006 plus the entirety of that postseason shackled by two cruel letters: I.R. As in injured reserve. As in unable to contribute.

So when the Bears reached football's grandest stage 10 years ago, preparing for their championship showdown against the Colts, Brown's frustration only intensified, peaking the night before the game.

"Heavy on me," Brown says now. "It hurt bad. … It was personal, man. I'm telling you. That disappointment. It was like 'Ahhhhh, man! After all this work?"

Ten years later — and seven years since he played his final NFL season with the Chiefs — Brown admits he has had to grapple for closure on his football career, to find the right mindset to enter the next phase of life.

Brown lives in San Clemente, Calif., with his wife, Erin, and two kids. Daughter Kyla is in sixth grade. Son Sam is in third. Brown's doing great, he wants it known. But he has battled anxiety he didn't fully expect, working to turn off — or at least control — the ultra-competitiveness and hyperfocus that fueled his football career.

And with his 39th birthday approaching this month he's still working to figure out what's next.

"I'm trying to become a better man, my friend," he says. "That's basically it. … Right now, I'm taking it day by day."

In 2006, Brown was a standout on the league's best defense, a playmaking safety, a leader. In what was arguably the most memorable win of that season — the 24-23 miracle over the Cardinals on "Monday Night Football" — Brown jumpstarted the Bears' comeback with a 3-yard fumble return touchdown on the final snap of the third quarter.

On the next series, however, he tore the Achilles tendon in his right leg.

Brown remembers the unbridled glee he felt watching Devin Hester's game-winning 83-yard punt return from the visiting locker room.

"Bonkers," he says. "I'm right out of the shower, watching on TV with a couple locker room attendants. I'm hopping around naked like crazy."

But his season-ending despair was beginning to set in. Brown loved that team deeply. He recalls the team barbecues, the paintball wars at Brian Urlacher's house and the unity that pulsed through the locker room.

'The Bears are who we thought they were!' An oral history of a magical Monday night Dan Wiederer

October 16, 2006. Glendale, Ariz. — A little after 9 p.m. Mountain time, a night's worth of energy and hysteria had turned to disbelief. All around University of Phoenix Stadium, this newly opened retractable roof gem in the desert, the shock proved palpable.

Glowing from the scoreboards, the night's...

October 16, 2006. Glendale, Ariz. — A little after 9 p.m. Mountain time, a night's worth of energy and hysteria had turned to disbelief. All around University of Phoenix Stadium, this newly opened retractable roof gem in the desert, the shock proved palpable.

Glowing from the scoreboards, the night's...

(Dan Wiederer)

"Everybody could feel that was a different team than the ones they had been on," he says. "It's something you can't explain. But when you feel it, you know it. It was the looks you'd give each other in the locker room, the way that the love was going through."

Brown's injury-related separation — from the grind, the bond, the investment — stung. "You lose your connectivity," he says.

Whatever emptiness he felt the night before the Super Bowl morphed into a hard-to-describe remorse after the Bears lost to the Colts 29-17.

Ten years later, Brown acknowledges, the "what might have?" grief that silently taunted him for so long.

"But what might have been isn't, right?" he says. "So you have to get off that. But I'm telling you, it's hard though. It's hard to do."

Brown calls Super Bowl week 10 years ago "the beginning of me losing my mind, so to speak." But he prefers speaking only vaguely about the struggles he has had finding inner peace since then. He has learned to combat self-pity and regret and relies on his deep spirituality for guidance.

"You have to confess what's on your heart, give up your words and it gives you freedom," Brown says. "It's different for everybody. But for me, that's given me freedom."

dwiederer@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @danwiederer

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