Column: Surviving another year of watching bad Chicago teams can only make us stronger, right?

People who think they’re being sympathetic sometimes apologize to sports writers paid to write about bad teams, mistakenly believing it makes our jobs tougher.

But if you grew up here and remember the great stories spun in the Tribune by Bob Verdi, Jerome Holtzman and other writers covering awful teams, you know that’s not true.

Sure, this could be the worst collective year for our teams since 1988, the so-called Dark Age of Chicago sports. But it’s a mistake to believe it hasn’t been an interesting year just because your favorite teams were either irrelevant (most of them) or folded down the stretch (the Cubs).

Good, bad or ugly, the local scene never lacked headlines, and this year was no different.

We saw the end of the Ken Williams-Rick Hahn regime on the South Side, the departure of David Ross on the North Side, and the beginning of Danny Wirtz’s stewardship on the West Side, not to mention the first-ever Chicago Street Race downtown, which included some pileups from professional drivers on a rainy day that rivaled anything Chicagoans have experienced on the Kennedy or Dan Ryan expressways.

There was another “Oh, no” moment, with Cubs outfielder Seiya Suzuki playing the role created in 1998 by Brant Brown, and stealthy stadium site searches by the Bears and White Sox.

We saw Soldier Field filled for a Chicago Fire game based on the mere possibility of Lionel Messi playing. Messi was a no-show due to injury, but no one seemed to mind.

A postgame concert at White Sox Park featuring Vanilla Ice was canceled. Also canceled was Bears defensive coordinator Alan Williams, following a rumor-filled episode as mysterious as the infamous gunshots in the Sox Park bleachers.

This was also the summer when checking the air quality index (AQI) became a thing, thanks to Canadian wildfires and a smoky haze that found its way to Chicago soon after the Cubs returned to Wrigley Field from the London trip in June.

Cubs radio announcer Pat Hughes made it into the Hall of Fame and also discussed Bob Dylan’s classic, “Tangled Up In Blue,” with analyst Ron Coomer during one otherwise dull game. Asked later about his love for the song, Hughes recited some of the lyrics to me. Hughes doing Dylan would make anyone’s day.

And there was Justin, Justin, Justin ... the quarterback saga revolving around Justin Fields had no real answers but plenty of opinions, solicited and otherwise. The less said about the Bears, the better.

Naturally, the internet did its thing, for better or worse, forcing the likes of Fields, Blackhawks GM Kyle Davidson and Bulls star DeMar DeRozan to react to things they didn’t really want to address.

DeRozan’s 9-year-old daughter, Diar, went viral in April by screaming at Toronto Raptors players’ free throws from behind the basket during a play-in game. It was a cute story that got plenty of media attention, especially after the Raptors went 18-for-36 from the line in the season-ending loss.

Then came the kicker: Father and daughter needed security leaving the arena in Toronto because of online threats. “What’s crazy is it’s just the world that we live in,” DeRozan said later. “No matter how good something could go, how good something could be, you still got miserable people out here who just don’t have a life. It’s sad.”

And getting sadder.

The Blackhawks couldn’t even tank correctly after dumping legend Patrick Kane and theoretically trying to finish with the worst record in the NHL. The Hawks beat the Pittsburgh Penguins 5-2 in the second-to-last game of the 2022-23 season, going from having the worst record to third-worst by taking a meaningless game, thus hurting their chances in the Connor Bedard draft lottery.

Despite an 11.5% chance of getting the top pick, the Hawks hit the jackpot. Bedard’s promise has so far outweighed the Hawks’ stumbles on and off the ice, where Corey Perry’s crash-and-burn for mysterious reasons brought back bad memories of badly behaving men.

The Hawks remained awful as Christmas rolled around, but the process was in place and no one seemed to mind.

The Bulls were stubbornly Bullish on their game plan, past failures be damned. Vice-president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas doubled down on the “Big 3,” re-signing Nikola Vučević and making no significant offseason changes.

The Bulls held their first team meeting after an opening game loss, saw Zach LaVine concede in November he wouldn’t mind playing elsewhere, and then experienced a pre-Christmas surge with LaVine injured that featured Coby White as the go-to scorer.

Did Karnišovas have the right plan but the wrong “Big 3″? The turnaround was so unexpected it now makes LaVine’s eventual return to the starting lineup a potential risk to the newly created mojo.

Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf’s other underachievers, the White Sox, had no mojo from Day One. The Sox’s 101-loss season had its moments, but then again, too few to mention. The biggest loss came after the season, when play-by-play man Jason Benetti revealed he was leaving for the same job with the Detroit Tigers.

The reaction from Sox fans was to be expected — a combination of shock, disappointment in management and a call for Reinsdorf to sell the team.

Whether Benetti was describing shortstop Elvis Andrus trying to fix his glove in the White Sox dugout, or declaring “54-40 or fight” during a Big Ten game — noting both the score and a rallying cry for war in the 1840s — he’s a unique presence among broadcasters. His style might not be everyone’s cup of nonfat latte, but it works more often than not. His non sequiturs require thinking, and sometimes Googling.

Reinsdorf admitted to reporters in September that things got so bad this year he DVRd the games and wouldn’t watch if the Sox lost, proving he’s a smart guy but not a die-hard. Sox fans watched until the bitter end. Hair of the dog only makes you tougher.

Meanwhile, it was always something with these Cubs, including “No Sho” and “No Stro,” along with “Oh, no!” The Cubs’ pursuit of Shohei Ohtani ended before the Japanese star signed a gargantuan $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and they remained without a free agent signing through Saturday. Popular starter Marcus Stroman, meanwhile, opted out of his contract to find his worth on the open market, but no one seemed to mind.

Cubs fans endured an up-and-down, then a down-and-up year, before president Jed Hoyer provided some electroshock therapy with the firing of Ross and the hiring of Craig Counsell.

The signature moment was the “Oh, no!” game in which Suzuki whiffed on an eighth-inning fly in Atlanta and cost the Cubs a win in the heat of the wild-card race. Suzuki handled the goat’s role well, and the Cubs would never have been in a wild-card position without his hitting. But the craziest of crazy games occurred in Milwaukee, on the Fourth of July, with the roof open and then mysteriously closed with no rain.

Cubs ace Justin Steele referred to it as the “drunk” game, an appropriate moniker. It included Ian Happ throwing out runners at the plate left and right, and the “Roofgate” episode with Ross complaining about the closing of the retractable roof at American Family Field during play, suggesting shenanigans on the part of the Brewers in the form of shadow-casting.

“There was a lot of (expletive) around today and it was really frustrating,” Ross said in a profanity-laden rant aired live on Marquee Sports Network.

Counsell shrugged it off and denied having anything to do with the machinations of the roof.

“I’m not in the roof business. I don’t want to be in the roof business,” Counsell said. “It’s a bad business to be in because you’re never going to make everybody happy in the roof business. It’s like the umpire business.”

And the manager business, he might have added.

Spoiler alert: Ross was fired. Counsell was hired. Wrigley Field, coincidentally, got a new roof over the winter.

At least the home season ended at Wrigley Field on a good note, with a picnic in the bleachers, where the team allowed fans to bring in food for one last party, continuing a bleacher tradition.

The ’23 Cubs were going nowhere, but no one seemed to mind.

Lord knows they’ve paid some dues getting through.