Lights Go Out at Bears Camp

The field at Olivet Nazarene University apparently isn't ideal for Bears practice play, either.

Darkness fell on the Bourbonnais field in the middle of the team's night practice on Wednesday evening, forcing the players to migrate to a nearby high school's field.

ComEd said it immediately sent a crew after the outage, which occured shortly after 8 p.m.  The utility said 60 percent of the area affected by the blackout was back online in about 10 minutes.

But that area did not include the Bears' practice field. Power there didn't come back for more than an hour, long after the team had already headed for a nearby high school.

ComEd blamed the outage on an equipment failure that knocked out about 1,600 customers.

The outage comes less than a week after fans gathered at Soldier Field for Family Fest were told there'd be no event because of poor field conditions. With a little more than an hour before practice was set to begin, the Bears last Friday boarded buses and headed back to Bourbonnais.

Fans -- and some players -- were naturally disappointed.

On Tuesday, the team lost about an hour of practice when bad weather -- rain and lightning -- rolled through the area.

And all of that comes at a time when the team needs all the practice they can get, given the lockout-shortened pre-season.

One can only hope the team's bit of bad luck changes before the season starts.

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