Lake Forest, Ill. ? The last time they played a meaningful game at Soldier Field, the Chicago Bears had reason to celebrate. After all, they won their first NFC championship in 21 years.

This week, they were in a foul mood.

Chicago opened the year with a 14-3 loss at San Diego, saw former Pro Bowl safety Mike Brown suffer a season-ending knee injury and took some verbal shots from the Chargers afterward.

Maybe it’s fitting that a team that absorbed some hard knocks is meeting the Kansas City Chiefs, the subject of the HBO series “Hard Knocks.”

The only positive for the Bears last week was they were able to shut down LaDainian Tomlinson. Now, they’ll try to do the same to Larry Johnson.

“L.T., he’s got everything,” linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer said. “Larry Johnson, he’s almost deceptive. You watch him on film, he doesn’t look blazing fast. But you don’t see anybody catching him. He doesn’t look like a huge power runner, but you see people bouncing off him, so he’s obviously doing something right.”

But little went right for him or the Chiefs in last week’s 20-3 loss at Houston.

“We’re kind of in a transformation,” coach Herm Edwards said. “Offensively, we’ve kind of been in a flux. We had an offense that was very, very prolific for a while.”

The offense took a hit when veteran Eddie Kennison injured his hamstring on the first play from scrimmage. He’s expected to miss a few weeks, leaving Kansas City without a receiver who had 860 yards with five touchdowns last year. Tight end Tony Gonzalez caught five passes for 28 yards against Houston.

And Johnson?

He was not himself, carrying 10 times for 43 yards and blaming that on his 25-day holdout. It ended with a five-year extension that made him the highest paid Chiefs player ever, but it came with a price. Besides the $14,280 per day he was fined, the Pro Bowl running back was not in shape, but he will be against Chicago.

“I’m going to be 100 percent when I go into this game,” said Johnson, who carried an NFL-record 416 times for 1,789 yards last season. “The first game, that’s one thing I hate about holding out of camp. I wish we would have done this contract thing a lot sooner like I wanted to, so I wouldn’t have had to hold out of camp, because you can’t practice game reps. You can’t practice game endurance until you’re actually in a game.”

Today, the Bears will try to do what they did to Tomlinson. They swarmed him, holding him to 25 yards on 17 carries, but it was a rough day otherwise for Chicago. Especially for Brown and starting nose tackle Dusty Dvoracek.

Brown ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee when Chargers fullback Lorenzo Neal wrapped his right arm around his neck and threw him to the ground in the fourth quarter. And Dvoracek went down moments later with a similar injury.

It was a painfully familiar scene for Brown and the Bears.

It was his third season-ending injury in four years, and it could mean the end of Brown’s tenure with the Bears.

“It stinks because he’s such a good player,” linebacker Brian Urlacher said. “He gets better every year, fights through those injuries, gets back on the field 100 percent and it happens again.”

The news wasn’t great on the other side, where the offense managed just 202 yards.

“Normally, defenses are ahead of the offense,” guard Ruben Brown said. “There’s a lot of timing that goes into making the offense work. It’s not just chasing the ball.”

Even so, seeing Cedric Benson run for 42 yards and Rex Grossman throw for 145 did little to ease fans’ angst. And the Chargers joined in the chorus of criticism.

Linebacker Matt Wilhelm told a California paper that former Bears defensive coordinator Ron Rivera described Grossman as a “mental midget.” Rivera, who now coaches Chargers linebackers, denied saying that.

And linebacker Shaun Phillips essentially called running back Benson soft, saying he’s easily rattled, during a radio interview.

“I don’t know what we have to defend,” Urlacher said. “It seems like people always say something. Guys I’ve never heard of talking. I don’t know who these guys are saying that stuff. Maybe they just want to get their names in the paper. I’m just tired of hearing it.”