AS CALEB WILLIAMS BLURS CHICAGO, HE SHOULD TAKE SIMONE BILES SHOPPING

His sensational plays blew away a town unaccustomed to quarterbacking mastery — and deflected attention from the Paris Olympics megastar, who wore an oddly unfashionable Green Bay Packers jacket

     A city didn’t pause because Kamala Harris and the Democrats are arriving, as store owners board up with sheets of plywood. Chicago stopped Saturday afternoon because Caleb Williams made a lakefront stadium turn silent in massive shock. After more than a century of futility, within a charter NFL franchise, he made two plays that no one ever has seen from a Bears quarterback.

     In a shotgun formation, he dropped back, spun to the left in his cleats with his back to the defense, then threw on the run in an all-time ragdoll diss of Mitch Trubisky and Justin Fields and everyone who followed Sid Luckman from the leather-helmet days. A deep pass was perfect to a fellow rookie, Rome Odunze, for 45 yards.

     “It’s pretty unreal, honestly,” Odunze said. “I just watched it back. Man he’s throwing off of one leg, putting it on my outside shoulder. It’s like, oooh! It’s magical what he’s doing back there in that backfield. He’s special.”

     Soon enough, Williams ran with the ball, stopped, backtracked briefly as Cincinnati defenders fell, rambled left, looked for receivers, then followed a blocker into the end zone. This was Week 3 of his first preseason. Already, he might be the best QB in team history, as Jim McMahon and Jay Cutler might agree, and if he avoids injuries, I’ll ask when he’ll copy Patrick Mahomes with a behind-the-back pass. What happened to the fools who supported Fields before he was shipped to Pittsburgh? They’re gleaming at Williams, wondering how he felt about his first razzle-dazzle run at Soldier Field.

     “That’s a good question,” he said. “It’s something that I’ve worked on in practice and watching Aaron Rodgers — I know he was a Green Bay guy. Sorry, guys. But over the past 19 or 20 years, you’ve seen him do these unbelievable things. Right, left, running straight. It’s just practicing it over time, perfecting it. There’s gonna be times I don’t put it exactly where I want to, but today it worked out. Rome had a good exit plan from his route and got upfield and made a marvelous catch. I just tried to give him a shot.”

     Actually, fans were doing backflips as they shrieked. Until, of course, they noticed Simone Biles on the field and wanted to tuck her into their own balance beam. As the star of the Paris Olympics, she never would show up for a U.S. practice in a Brazilian outfit, right? But she did precisely that, wearing a Packers jacket lined with photos of her husband, Bears safety Jonathan Owens, when he played last year in Green Bay. First Williams mentions Rodgers, then she alludes to a rival that has dominated the Bears. She also wore a black Prada hat and a black Balenciaga purse, not the sort of items one carries to a football game in that town.

     In the same day, the Bears had become a national story thanks to Williams, and just as quickly, they were yanked down by a masterful Olympian who overcame her mental twisties. Does Biles not understand how Chicago operates? If she lives in the suburbs with Owens, she needs to buy local garb.

     “It’s ridiculously unaware of your surroundings and insulting to her husband,” a fan wrote on social media.

     “With all due respect, Simone Biles gotta throw that jacket in the trash ASAP,” wrote another. “How did she get in with that?”

     She eventually removed the jacket and said into a TV camera, “What’s up, Chicago? Go Bears.” But when Biles doesn’t like online creeps, she is known to say, “Like y’all are so f—ing miserable. Leave us alone.”

     Said Owens: “She hasn’t been around much so she doesn’t have a lot of Bears gear and she was just supporting me. That was all about her showing her support of her husband. We’re going to have to get her some more Bears gear.”

     At least real fans, who have waited eons for help at the most important position in sports, could focus on Williams. “We’re going to be explosive,” he said of connecting with Odunze, drafted below him in the first round. “We’re two rooks, but we’re trying to catch up to some older guys as fast as we can. We’ve got to make sure we’re right on par with them, to be able to be efficient, function, go out there and be explosive, be on the same page and win games. Ultimately, that’s what we’re here to do. And to have a guy like that who was drafted with me, we’re going to keep growing and keep building this connection.”

     Earlier in the week, Joe Burrow made the case that Williams already is legitimate. “He’s going to be a really good player. I’m excited to watch him,” said the Bengals star, who almost won a Super Bowl as he avoids troubling injuries. “I think that’s what separates people, is, when you can maintain a level-headed, even-keel aura, personality, whatever you want to call it. There’s going to be ups and downs. But can you come back the next day and go about your process the same way you did the week before, whether you won or whether you’ve lost? Whether you threw four picks or you had five touchdowns? You just have to have the mindset … that you’re going to be better.”

     With Odunze and major pass-catchers in DJ Moore, Keenan Allen and Cole Kmet, he has a chance to have a first season of highs over interception lows. He was told about a fresh tweet from Tyreek Hill, who was watching the Bears and wrote, “Caleb Williams so nice he remind me of …” He was referring to Mahomes, who was completing another preseason miracle with his pass to Travis Kelce.

     “It’s respect. It’s cool and all. But I’m Caleb Williams,” he said. “Patrick Mahomes is Patrick Mahomes. And Tyreek Hill is Tyreek Hill. Much love to them. But we’re here to win games for the Chicago Bears.”

     The mindset, as Burrow said, is ideal for August. “A nice professional day for a quarterback,” said his head coach, Matt Eberflus.

     Now, have Williams accompany Biles on a shopping trip. Eight million people will follow.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.