I’ve been writing this column since 1996. In that time, I have covered three mayoral administrations, two World Series, one complete collapse of the elevated tracks near Wabash that the CTA assured me was “not a cause for concern,” and approximately nine thousand Cubs rebuilding years. But if there is one constant in thirty years of Chicago journalism — one throughline that weaves through every election, every blizzard, every downtown development announcement — it is this: somebody in a suit is trying to build the Bears a new stadium, and nothing has ever come of it, and they are trying again.

Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson made their latest joint pitch this week, standing in front of what I can only assume was a very expensive architectural rendering showing a gleaming domed structure on the lakefront surrounded by trees and smiling pedestrians who do not exist. I’ve seen this rendering before. I’ve seen six versions of this rendering. The building in the rendering is always the same building, give or take some glass and a slightly different angle on the Ferris wheel they keep adding for reasons no one has ever explained to me. I have watched that Ferris wheel get added and removed from those renderings more times than I’ve watched the Bears score a fourth-quarter touchdown, which, as longtime readers know, is not saying much.

To be fair to the Governor and the Mayor, they are not the first. I’ve watched Mayor Daley stand in front of a version of this rendering. I watched Mayor Emanuel, who if I recall correctly had his own rendering with additional transit connectivity. Mayor Lightfoot had a rendering that I believe included a hotel component. They all have a hotel component now. You can’t build a stadium in this city anymore without a hotel component. I remember when a stadium was just a stadium and you watched football in it and then you went home. Now it needs to be a “destination” with “year-round activation.” I am 61 years old and I do not know what year-round activation means and I refuse to find out.

The Bears, for their part, have been wanting a new stadium since they left Wrigley Field in 1971. That is 55 years of wanting a new stadium. That is longer than the Soviet Union lasted. The Soviet Union, I would remind you, actually built things during that time. Some of those things were wrong and bad, but they built them. The Bears have a rendering and a preference for the lakefront and a lease at Soldier Field that runs through 2033, and somewhere in that gap is what local officials like to call a “pathway forward,” which I have come to understand means “nothing has been decided but we would like credit for the meeting.”

I will say this about Soldier Field: I have never loved the stadium but I have made my peace with it. It looks like a spaceship landed on a Greek temple, which is not a thing I would have designed, but it is a thing Chicago did, and there is something almost admirable about a city that looks at a century-old colonnaded monument and thinks, we should put a flying saucer on top of this. That’s Chicago. That’s the whole thing, right there. You can’t replace that with a dome that looks like every other dome. A dome that looks like every other dome is a Ravens dome or a Cardinals dome or some other dome in some other city that I have never visited and have no plans to.

The lakefront question is the one that gets me every time. The lakefront, for those who have moved here from somewhere else and need to be told, is not supposed to have things built on it. Daniel Burnham said so. The city said so. The Illinois Supreme Court has said so, on multiple occasions, with what I understand to be a fair amount of emphasis. And yet every five years, someone stands at a podium with a rendering that puts a building — sometimes a stadium, once an airport, once something called an “entertainment campus” — on the lakefront, and every five years the lawyers start arguing about what “public trust” means and whether a dome counts as a building or more of a “civic amenity,” and the whole thing takes three years and then nothing happens. The rendering gets updated. The Ferris wheel stays or goes depending on which consultant is in charge that month. A new mayor gets elected.

I don’t blame Governor Pritzker. I don’t blame Mayor Johnson. I don’t even particularly blame the Bears, who by any reasonable measure should have a stadium that was not renovated in a way that got it delisted from the NFL’s historic venue registry. I blame the situation. I blame the 55 years of accumulated momentum behind a project that everyone agrees should exist and no one has ever been able to agree on how to pay for or where to put. I blame the rendering, which is always beautiful and always has trees and always has a Ferris wheel that I cannot explain and which has never, not once in thirty years of my covering this story, been replaced by an actual building. One of these days it will be. I’ll believe it when I can park there.

Until then, the suit will go back in the closet and the rendering will go back in the drawer and some morning in 2029 I will open my notebook and write the same column again and I will call it something like “City Officials Pitch Bears Stadium Again” and I will not be wrong to do so.