The Bears and Vikings will meet Sunday at Soldier Field, jockeying for position in a congested race for the NFC North championship. As kickoff approaches, here’s the inside slant on three notable storylines.

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1. Khalil Mack’s pass rushing artistry is a thing of beauty.

You can bet quarterback Kirk Cousins’ time at Vikings practice this week has been a little more nervy than usual. A tad more OCD. Just a veteran quarterback checking over both shoulders and clutching the football tighter than ever. The message from coach Mike Zimmer and offensive coordinator Kevin Stefanski: Hold on to the ball! Extra tight.

“Yeah,” Zimmer said Wednesday. “For sure. We try to do that every week. But this week will be extra important.”

Khalil Mack can have that effect. Cousins knows it. Thus, as the Vikings quarterback has scanned through footage of the Bears defense this week, he has done so with eyes open — wide open — and a terrifying reminder that No. 52 is always lurking.

Just how much is Mack’s presence felt? Put it this way: Cousins spent time Wednesday giving himself a nice pat on the back for an incompletion he threw in last year’s game at Soldier Field. It was a desperate third-and-9 shot-put heave in the second quarter that came nowhere close to intended receiver Adam Thielen.

Still, Cousins took satisfaction in the incompletion. He still does.

“Adam was coming on a shallow cross,” Cousins said. “And I felt (Mack) around my backside. And I realized that, hey, if I take a full stroke here with my arm, he’s going to get the ball. So I kind of short-stroked it and missed the throw. But I walked off the field after that drive saying I’ll miss that throw all day if it means it’s just an incompletion and we punt. If he’s going to get my arm and it’s a fumble and now they’re going in at the plus-20 (yard line), that changes the game.”

On Monday night in Landover, Md., Redskins quarterback Case Keenum wasn’t sharp enough in that department.

Throughout the Bears’ 31-15 win, Mack kept swarming Keenum. And just about every time he got there, he jarred the ball loose.

The Bears All-Pro edge rusher finished with two strip-sacks. A third was negated by a defensive penalty.

Mack’s biggest contribution came on first-and-15 in the second quarter. With a one-on-one battle against right tackle Morgan Moses, the Bears star turned the corner and tomahawked Keenum’s right forearm. The football squirted free. Akiem Hicks recovered. The Bears offense turned the takeaway into a two-play, 11-yard touchdown drive and a 21-0 lead.

Through 17 games as a Bear, Mack’s forced fumble total is up to nine.

“That’s Mack being Mack,” Bears safety Eddie Jackson said. “The only thing he’s focused on is the ball. … He doesn’t just look for a tackle or sack. He’s always looks to get the ball out.”

Added Zimmer: “He plays with such violence and desire to get to the quarterback. His physicality really shows up to me.”

Cousins would have probably gotten more restful sleep this week had he just watched the “Saw” series on an endless loop. The clips of Mack being Mack can be that terrifying.

Mack’s strip-sack that didn’t count Monday night — negated by an illegal-hands-to-the-face penalty against Prince Amukamara — featured a relentless rush in which he powered past tight end Vernon Davis and then beat Moses, finishing with another violent hack at Keenum’s arm.

Ball out. Bears recovered.

Cousins knows he’ll have to be hyperaware Sunday to avoid similar disasters.

“It’ll always be a risk-reward balance of, hey, I can escape here and I can make a play versus knowing when to say ‘Uncle’ and admit ‘You got us on this down, but we have to play for the next play, too, and not lose the game on one snap.’”

[ Matt Nagy’s profane pep talk with Mitch Trubisky saw the Bears coach trying to close the gap between motivator and QB guru ]

Cousins also stressed he can’t be so jumpy that he speeds up his clock in the pocket and bolts too early.

“You always play by feel,” he said. “If you predetermine stuff, you get in trouble. So I’m going to drop back and go through my reads and when I sense the pocket’s closing down, I’ll use my instincts to react and make the right decision.

“You practice and you play all these years to train your instincts correctly so you can rely on them in a game. And if you start to predetermine, oh, he’s going to get in here, so I’m going to leave the pocket early or I’m going to get rid of the ball to my checkdown, the next thing you know a guy is running wide open 40 yards down the field and you’ve predetermined that you were going to throw it to the checkdown. Or you had a pocket and you predetermine you were going to leave.”

For Cousins, that part of the game plan is straightforward. Play by feel. Make quick decisions. Have a sense of where the pressure is.

Easier said than done, of course. Especially against Mack.

2. “I was trying to shower. And the next thing you know? You’re naked on the internet.”

That was Kyle Long’s thumbnail summary of what went haywire in the moments after the Bears beat the Redskins 31-15 on Monday night. In a jubilant visitors locker room at FedEx Field, running back Tarik Cohen wanted to let his Instagram followers (228,000 and growing) experience the victory celebration. Live and unfiltered.

Unfortunately, behind Cohen and across the locker room, Long was in front of his stall in the buff. Before Cohen realized his blunder and deleted the 34-second video, the world got a surprise. Club Dub had temporarily become a male revue.

Kyle Long. Full frontal. For almost 10 seconds.

NSFW.

Long didn’t become aware of his peep show moment until after a postgame visit with his parents. When he boarded the Bears bus, a handful of teammates encouraged him to check social media.

“They said, ‘You are naked viral on the internet,’” Long said. “And I thought to myself, ‘Have I been hacked?’”

OK. Um. We’ll save the follow-up questions on that for a later time. We’ll assume Long was joking. Maybe.

But he has at least taken his new moment of infamy with good humor.

“It was funny,” Long said. “We’re getting a good laugh at it.”

Still, the Bears did the requisite damage control Wednesday at Halas Hall. Cohen offered a sincere apology. Coach Matt Nagy offered a teaching moment.

“It was a mistake,” Nagy said. “And nothing that was malicious at all. But it was a mistake. So let’s make sure that that mistake doesn’t happen again.”

Great. Cool. No more live postgame videos in the locker room.

Done and done.

Still, if there is any player in the Bears locker room able to handle the increased exposure, it’s Long. The veteran offensive lineman is never shy and hardly above some juvenile laughter. So while Long wasn’t necessarily thrilled at what went down, he also was not mortified.

“Embarrassing?” Long said Wednesday. “Em-bare-ass-ing! It caught me by surprise. Had I known I’d be full nude on the internet, I probably would have prepared a little bit more. … The plane ride home was comedy club, as you would imagine. But for big guys around the league, I’ll take that one.”

[ Bears Q&A: Why isn’t Mitch Trubisky running more? Where has Tarik Cohen gone in the offense? Could Alex Smith be a future QB option? ]

Long even did a bit of a victory lap on Barstool’s “Pardon My Take” podcast, participating in a nine-minute interview this week in which the Instagram video was pretty much the only topic without ever being directly brought up.

The shtick was rich.

Example 1:

PFT Commenter: From your end, it seemed like you were playing a little bit of bully ball. You were running the ball a lot. What kind of, like, jumbo packages did they have you guys out there doing?

Long: You know, you’d think that with my large stature there’d be more, like, jumbo packages. But man, we were just trying to squeak out yards where we could.

Example 2:

Long: We showed up to D.C. and it was hot. I looked up the weather for (Monday) and it said 88 degrees. So I had everything all set. I was hydrated. And then the game happened and you’re just drenched in sweat. And I had heard about a cold front coming in. And I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it, man. Because, man, it hit me hard. Right at the end of the game, man. As soon as I hit that locker room, that cold front (hit).

Example 3:

Long: The plane lands and you get home and it’s 4:30 in the morning and you don’t know if you’re dreaming or not. But you notice you’re trending. And it’s not often that offensive linemen are trending for a good thing.

Barstool Big Cat: But you were for the big win. For the huge win. For the Bears’ huge win.

…

PFT Commenter: First of all, I just want to say that a lot of people are jumping to certain conclusions about the Bears’ play, about the Skins’ play. But you need to wait until the All-22 comes out before you can really evaluate what you saw on film. A lot of times there are different angles and that makes a big difference. It’s deceiving. So until you really get a full perspective …

Long: Yeah. A play may look good on the sideline. But you throw that end zone (view) on and, you know, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board.

Perfect. Well-played. Really. The grind of an NFL season needs more moments of levity, of tongue-in-cheek silliness. So kudos to Long for rolling with the punches and not making this mini-melodrama overly serious. And here’s hoping the other Bears take up a collection for locker room bathrobes. Or maybe some makeshift, portable changing rooms. Something. Anything.

Thanks to Cohen, we’ve seen too much.

“Wrong place, wrong time. For both of us,” Long said. “Moving forward, we’ll have better situational awareness. … You wake up the next morning and you’re like, ‘That must have been a bad dream, right? And then it’s, no, I’m not dreaming.”

3. There may be hidden stakes to Sunday’s game at Soldier Field.

For the Bears, an 0-2 start in division play would be dispiriting. Losing both of those games at home? It might be a torpedo to their chances to repeat as NFC North champs.

Sounds exaggerated, right? But maybe it isn’t.

The NFL went to the eight-division format in 2002. And, according to research by the Tribune’s Rich Campbell, in the 17 seasons since, no team in the NFC North has ever lost two division home games and still won the division.

Leaguewide over that span, only 12 teams have lost two division home games and rallied to be division champs. That, according to Campbell, is a 9% clip. Plus, his research showed, of those dozen teams, four of them lost a home division game in Week 17 after they had clinched.

So, yes, Sunday’s game has plenty of significance for the Bears.

Meanwhile, Matt Nagy’s team is also looking for its second consecutive three-win September, a fast start that history tells us can be important. Over the previous 30 seasons, here’s a look at the Bears teams that have won at least three times in September and how they finished.

[ Can the Bears beat the Vikings in Week 4? Check the numbers. ]

• 2018: 3-1 in September; finished 12-4 (first in the NFC North)
• 2013: 3-1 in September; finished 8-8 (second in the NFC North)
• 2010: 3-0 in September; finished 11-5 (first in the NFC North, advanced to NFC championship game)
• 2006: 3-0 in September; finished 13-3 (first in the NFC North, advanced to Super Bowl XLI)
• 1991: 4-0 in September; finished 11-5 (second in the NFC Central, wild-card berth)
• 1990: 3-1 in September; finished 11-5 (first in the NFC Central)
• 1989: 3-0 in September; finished 6-10 (fourth in the NFC Central)

Just something to chew on.