SAN ANTONIO (AP) On the night before Easter, a night when Sister Jean could reasonably be contemplating more consequential affairs, she will instead be festooned in her maroon and yellow letter jacket, sitting in her wheelchair on the floor of one of Americas greatest sports cathedrals, praying for an entirely different sort of miracle.
Shell be trying to will the underdog, 11th-seeded Ramblers from the Jesuit school of Loyola-Chicago another step along the road to a national championship. Its a road even the most pious fan wouldnt have dreamed of a mere three weeks ago.
More than any single player or coach, it is the 98-year-old nun, Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, who has left an indelible mark on this years NCAA Tournament, with her scouting reports and T-shirt-ready advice Worship, work and wisdom lending an almost otherworldly credence to the idea that, in sports, anything is possible.
And for those seeking a deeper meaning to Loyolas improbable trip to the Final Four, her presence raises questions that would normally be out of bounds in most mainstream sports conversations:
Do Sister Jeans prayers carry more weight than, say, those of the Michigan fans who will be rooting against Loyola on Saturday?
Is it OK to pray for something as pedestrian as, say, your team to win the big game?
Do miracles really happen in sports?
To sum them all up: Does God really care about basketball?
Because God cares about the whole health of a human being, and because play is an element of the human experience, God cares about play, says Joe Price, an ordained minister who teaches classes on sports and religion at Whittier College. Now, whether God cares about competitive sport at a professional level is perhaps a different question.
Big-time sports has been long familiar with enthusiastically religious athletes and ultra-successful programs from religious colleges. Tim Tebow, Carson Wentz and Kurt Warner; Notre Dame, BYU and, yes, another Final Four participant this weekend, Villanova. They and others have come to the fore and brought their religion with them, front and center.
And yet, Loyola feels like something different. Instead of a player or coach who stands out as the main catalyst for all this success, its a nun who is not only bringing added attention to her beloved players, but doing it in a way that unravels stereotypes about the elderly to say nothing of the millions of women who have chosen her calling over the centuries.
Shes showing that, yes, nuns are regular people with a special calling, says Rebecca Alpert, a religion professor at Temple whose book, Religion and Sports, looks at ways those two facets of life intersect.
It also brings up this awkward dissonance: Villanova is also accompanied by a person of the cloth, the Rev. Rob Hagan. And yet, because he represents a school that is better known, top seeded, a champion only two years ago and the furthest thing from a plucky underdog, Father Rob is a supporting player in this drama no bobblehead as of yet who is receiving his 15 minutes in large part because Sister Jean has gotten hers on the other side of the bracket.
Which brings up the question: If Father Robs and Sister Jeans teams square off in an all-Catholic final Monday night, who wins?
The idea of divine intervention in sports goes way back, even decades before Al Michaels famously asked Do you believe in miracles? as the seconds ticked down in the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey teams seminal victory over the Russians a bunch of amateurs unbelievably beating a bunch of professionals.
And yet, the so-called Miracle on Ice hardly stands alone in sports, where the never-ending search for the upset, the unexpected, the unexplainable, is, in fact, the reason we play the game.
