We’re deep into fall now, which means we’re deep into a few stories unfolding with great drama all around us. There are national, regional and neighborhood versions. You can share one with a neighbor over a backyard fence and another with a cousin who lives 2,000 miles away. There are many of these incredible tales, and they happen every year with a mixture of clockwork and unpredictability, which is why we follow them with such interest and care.

These stories, of course, are sports stories. Whether they make the cover of Sports Illustrated or page C-3 of your local daily, they can have Shakespearean highs and lows and more genuine emotional payoff than the fevered dreams of Walt Disney.

In the United States, there are two high points for sports fans each year: There is the late winter/early spring, with the March Madness of college basketball, the opening days of Major League Baseball and the eternal playoffs of professional basketball and hockey; and there is the fall, with the mini-marathons of college and pro football and most important (to me anyway), the Fall Classic of baseball.

I’m writing this several weeks ahead of the fall due to YouthWorker Journal‘s lead time. By the time you read this issue, I expect the New York Yankees will have won the World Series (they look unbeatable at this moment), that Tim Tebow of the Florida Gators will be preparing to win his second Heisman Trophy and that the Denver Broncos will be 0-8 halfway into the season.

Who knows? No one does. The Yankees may meet a Chicago Cubs team destined to end a decades-long championship drought. Tebow, God forbid, may break his ankle; or his Gators may get hooked by the Texas Longhorns. The Broncos may surprise everyone and dominate the AFC West. (One can dream, right?)

No one can know anything for certain before it happens. That’s why we watch. That’s why it’s always fun, always heart wrenching, always filled with drama. Sports is the essence of the unexpected. That’s why it matters so much to us and why we’re so dedicated to watching. We get to watch the unknown unfold. The possibility of greatness lies before us, which means the possibility of tragedy is nearby, too. That tension pulls us in, lifts us up, makes us ready and willing to believe—and if we’re crushed, to believe all over again when next season starts anew.

I don’t need to spell out for you the links between the way we watch sports and the way we experience faith. Right? Of course faith, whether we think we have it or not, is what we’ll find at the bottom of our adoration of sports.

A lot of people complain that religion and sports are too intertwined—a quarterback thanking Jesus after a victory, a team circling up for a televised pre-game prayer. I get that concern. At the very least, it’s hard to trust the authenticity of such moments, especially when some of the players who talk about their faith have off-the-field lives that seem less than faithful.

I suspect we’ve not yet begun to grasp how religion and sports are joined. So this fall, as you watch sports—as you’re inexorably drawn in to the drama, whether you’re a casual fan or a fantasy-sports-playing obsessive—reflect on what’s underneath the pull. With what in sports are you connecting? In what ways does your love of sports relate to your compulsion toward faith?

Those are rhetorical questions, but I’d love to hear from you at pattondodd@gmail.com Red Sox; go Broncos; and Hook ’em Horns.