If life in the NFL were perfect, a team could ride off into the sunset of a bye week flying high and waiting to get some rest and relaxation for the first time since late July.
Unfortunately for the Green Bay Packers, the rest will come, but the opportunity for a confidence boost and a victory slipped away with Sunday's 23-20 loss to the St. Louis Rams at Lambeau Field.
Though it clearly would have been more enjoyable to finish on a positive note before heading into the break, the consensus among the players in the locker room was that a little rest is always welcome when it comes to the rigors of the NFL season.
"Every year when the bye comes, everyone says this is a perfect time for a bye," Brett Favre said. "(In this case) This is a perfect time for a bye week. I think if you're 4-1, you say the same thing because you need to gets guys healed up, kind of regroup, and all those things. We're 1-4 and you could say the same thing.
"There's different ways to look at it, but we need to get something going. In my mind, I want to go right back out and play and try to get a win. It would generate some momentum. It's no different when you're winning. You don't want to stop that. You want guys to continue to have that feeling."
Right tackle Mark Tauscher echoed the sentiments of Favre and admitted that there is enough work to be done once the team gets back.
"That question always comes up around the bye week," Tauscher reiterated. "But it does seem like it came at the right time. There's different things. We need to regroup and re-energize ourselves and try to get this thing turned around for the second half of the season."
Center Scott Wells doesn't mind in the least that the team receives a break. Yet in another sense he, like Favre, wants to get back onto the field and avenge Sunday's difficult loss as soon as possible.
"I don't care when the bye week is," he said. "You go forward. It sounds like a broken record but you learn and you move on. As bad as it hurts, you can't harp on this long because you have 11 more games to play.
"We have a bye week for everybody to rest up, heal up, take the time to make the corrections they need to from the past couple weeks and when we play Miami, hopefully we won't make the same mistakes."
For other players, such as Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila, the bye affords him an opportunity to spend quality time with his family and put football on the backburner for a while.
"It's a good thing," Gbaja-Biamila said. "It's always an opportunity to rest, enjoy the family, and look back on what we could have done in the first quarter of the season. It's a great opportunity to grow and rest and we have to take advantage of that."
How players enjoy the down time will be up to them, but one thing is for certain. When the team returns it will be looking up from a 1-4 hole. Only Detroit, without a win, is sitting below the Green and Gold in the NFC North standings. Chicago and Minnesota both won on Sunday moving them to 5-0 and 3-2, respectively.
Of course, the bright spot in this situation is that there is a lot of season left. And though there obviously is room for improvement, there also are signs that the team is getting better on a weekly basis, even if the record may not suggest that.
According to Greg Jennings, who continued his stellar play with five catches for 105 yards and a touchdown, the team needs to rely on each other to get through the tough times.
"We're already down four games but we have a lot of young guys and we have some veteran guys that have been in this situation before, too," Jennings said. "We just have to keep our heads up, dig down deep, do some soul searching and want to win."
Aaron Kampman agreed with Jennings but believes that the loss may serve as a motivational tool for the future.
"This is just a tough one to swallow and it's going to be tough to watch the film," Kampman said. "But hopefully it will serve as a continuing motivation for us to push us over the hump so we don't have to feel this way again."
