In the third quarter, he carried it six times.

In the fourth quarter, he didn't carry it at all.

Was he unhappy about that?

"No," Benson said, "I stayed pretty mellow about it."

Football being the complex, confounding sport that it is, you could spend 24 hours a day, including Thanksgiving dinner, trying to figure out why the Bears had a hot hand yesterday and quit handing the ball to it.

Benson came out of the blocks at Qwest Field like a man on a qwest, tired of being qwiet.

He burst a career-best 43 yards for a touchdown on the day's second play.

He bulled 20 yards the next time he touched the ball.

A mellow fellow Benson may have been, but other Bears were anything but.

"Everybody on the sidelines was pretty amped," Benson said. "They were screaming out, `200!' "

Like in 200 yards.

Like in that big, beautiful, breakout game that the Bears have been looking for since the day they hooked the Texas Longhorn in the 2005 draft.

Sixty-three yards on his first two handoffs—this was going to be it, Benson's fantasy-league dream day.

More than 56 minutes of football remained to be played. The game with the Seattle Seahawks wasn't even five minutes old.

Where did he go?

He disappeared like David Copperfield. He became as difficult to find in Seattle as the sun.

When the scoreboard read Seahawks 30, Bears 23, the numbers that no one at Qwest could quite comprehend were not the points. They were the running back's stats.

Benson: 11 carries, 89 yards.

He carried the football 11 times and Adrian Peterson, Rex Grossman, Jason McKie and Devin Hester carried the football 11 times.

Grossman, meanwhile, launched 37 passes.

So where did Benson go? Why did the Bears stop giving him the ball?

"I'm not the person to ask," said Grossman, a big help.

The person to ask, Lovie Smith, was asked, "How do you explain it?"

"How do I explain it?" echoed the coach. "We probably should have given him the ball a little bit more."

After all, it certainly did look as if Benson was about to have a huge, The Other Adrian Peterson-like day.

"He has that capability," as Smith said. "We've just got to keep feeding it to him."

Why they didn't is a mystery.

Partly it was due to the fact that the Bears' game plan was to get their own Peterson a few more touches.

A plan like this isn't a bad one to have. But it needs a contingency, one that allows for the possibility that the No. 1 back is in rare form.

Seattle was caught sleeping on Benson's first run.

"Cedric did a great job of reading it, cutting it back and exploiting it," Seahawks defensive end Patrick Kerney said. "Then we rallied after that and we did a decent job against a very good back."

Kind of him to call Benson that.

His longest gain going into this game was 22 yards after carrying the ball in the NFL more than 400 times.

Nobody expected another Walter Payton, but another Anthony Thomas, another Thomas Jones, yes, at the very least.

He looked like the Longhorn of old, prime beef on the hoof, and could taste the excitement.

"Yeah, naturally," Benson said, "especially when you get a jump like that. You're ready to roll."

A 10-point edge belonged to the Bears almost before the Seahawks knew what hit them. Benson followed right tackle Fred Miller's block for the first score, and Miller felt confident after those first two possessions, saying, "He was doing a great job of finding the holes."

Then a hole appeared in the ground and Benson disappeared from sight.

This was no blowout. This wasn't a game in which the Bears were behind by so many points that they had to pass to stand a chance.

Yet in the fourth quarter, they passed on nearly every down.

Benson expressed no disappointment, other than in the Bears not winning the game.

"I didn't really think about me that much," he said.