I’ve been watching Indiana try to talk to Chicago for the better part of three months now, and I have to say, it is one of the more remarkable things I have witnessed in a long career of watching Illinois handle its neighbors. Indiana — the state directly to our east, which shares our time zone and our lake and absolutely nothing else we’d care to discuss — has been gushing in the direction of the Chicago Bears with the specific energy of someone who spots their favorite celebrity at a restaurant and immediately forgets how to act like a normal person. The Indiana legislature has apparently held emergency sessions about this. They have rushed proposals through committee. One lawmaker, by all accounts, used the phrase “game-changer” in a floor speech with complete sincerity. Chicago’s response has been to look the other direction and act like someone rang a doorbell it didn’t hear.

This is correct. This is, in fact, the exact right response, and I say that as a person who has been skeptical of the Bears’ own stadium negotiations for going on four years. The Bears, as longtime readers know, have been attempting to move from Soldier Field to a new stadium on the lakefront or the suburbs or the surface of the moon or wherever it is they’re going this week. They have been attempting this with the energy of a man who is not entirely sure he wants to move but has already mentioned it at dinner twice and now feels obligated to keep the conversation going. Springfield has been difficult. The lakefront plan has been complicated. Various suburban proposals have come and gone. Indiana, watching all of this from across the state line, has apparently concluded that now is an excellent moment to insert itself.

I want to be clear about something: Indiana is allowed to want things. Indiana is a fine state. I have driven through Indiana many times, mostly on the way to somewhere else, and I have always found it to be exactly what it says it is. The corn is well-organized. The rest stops are adequate. When I have been pulled over in Indiana, which has happened more than twice for reasons I won’t go into, the state police have been professional. I have no complaint with Indiana as a geographic and political entity. My complaint is with the specific idea that the Chicago Bears — the team named for this city, founded in this city, wearing the colors of this city — would, because a Midwestern state legislature passed a fast-tracked incentive package, pack up the franchise and head east on I-90 like they owe someone something.

The Bears, to their credit, have not encouraged this. Their front office has responded to Indiana’s advances with the sort of formal non-statements that large organizations use when they want to acknowledge that something was said without confirming that it was worth saying. “We appreciate the interest,” roughly. “We’re exploring all options.” You know the language. It is the language of people who have been told by their lawyers not to say what they actually think, which, in this case, appears to be “thank you for the offer but we are the Chicago Bears and we would like to continue being the Chicago Bears.” This is a reasonable position. I share it.

What I find genuinely interesting about the whole situation — and I say “interesting” in the specific way that someone who has covered this city for thirty years means it, which is: baffling and slightly depressing but with a certain dark comedy to it — is that the very people in Springfield who have made it difficult to get a Chicago stadium deal done are the same people who are now, presumably, watching Indiana move faster on this and doing the math. The Indiana legislature gushed over the proposal in days. Taxpayers who might have had concerns were, by some accounts, “conspicuously absent from comments,” which is another way of saying that when people in government move at the speed of enthusiasm rather than the speed of governance, corners get cut. I have seen this before. It does not always end well.

But here’s the thing about Chicago — and this is something that out-of-state legislators occasionally forget when they get excited about our sports franchises — we have been doing this for a long time. We have been threatened with team relocations and cross-border wooings and “the grass is greener” arguments since before the first Wrigley Field was built. The Cubs threatened to leave once. The White Sox almost went to Florida. The Blackhawks, the Bulls — everyone, at some point, has been the subject of some other city’s enthusiasm. We’ve seen it. We understand, structurally, that the threat and the actual departure are very different things, and that the threat is mostly a negotiating tool and the departure is almost always a bluff. So we respond to Indiana’s overtures the way Chicago responds to most things it doesn’t need to take seriously: by letting the other party tire themselves out while we wait to see what develops.

Is there a world where the Bears end up in Indiana? I suppose. Is it the world we’re living in? Not based on anything I can see. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping one eye on Springfield and one eye on wherever the Bears’ stadium discussions actually stand, and both of them firmly turned away from Indiana, which is, I believe, the appropriate Chicago posture. We wish them well with their corn. The Bears, as I understand it, have a schedule to attend to.