As the new Cubs manager described his recruitment — a meeting outside his mobile home, parked at a Florida panhandle beach, Theo Epstein joked, “We’ll always have Pensacola.”

Epstein’s not much of a comedian, and it wasn’t particularly funny, but the reference was notable for another reason.

It was a nod to “We’ll always have Paris,” which Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine says to Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa Lund in “Casablanca,” part of the climactic scene before she boards the plane to Lisbon with her husband. The line was ranked No. 43 on the American Film Institute’s list of “100 Years…100 Movie Quotes,” joining four others from that script, the most of any one film.

The writers won the Academy Award that year for Best Screenplay. They were Philip and Julius Epstein, Theo’s grandfather and great-uncle.

WE'RE HAPPY FOR YA

WE'RE HAPPY FOR YA

Always full of thoughts, Dan will start sharing a few more quick hits with you every week in The Bernstein Brief.

It's almost as if Theo Epstein was born to succeed. There is no argument. The evidence is in.

Typical BernSTINE thought process.

Jewish man+upperclass upbringing =Born to Succeed.

I bet BernSTINE thinks Theo's life mirrors his own.

What a pathetic little troll.

Dan now thinks Trestman should be fired. How the tide turns.

After all the yelling and berating of callers who made the slightest suggestion that there was any kind of problem with Cutler, is dan really now going to characterize Cutler as "a problem that other teams gave up on" in order to further his bashing of Bears management? Really?

Anyone here start a Maddonsanalyticcard twitter account yet?

I tuned in late so I couldn't tell if they were joking or not, but Terry was going in pretty hardcore on the Bears needing a proven coach. A known quantity. A BIG NAME. Which if they weren't joking, and Matty made it sound like they were, then they're going to need a reminder of the Jan 2013 shows.

Trestman was out of the NFL for eight years.