The Lutheran Church in the Foothills is often called The Church of the Holy Touchdown.
The relationship between sports and religion in America goes beyond praying for your team and common superstitions. American sports have a rich history of specific teams and iconic moments that resonated and continue to resonate with religious connotations. A sports fan originated as a term for a religious zealot or fanatic (from the Latin fanus, "temple"). The extreme connection between fans and their teams often manifests itself as a kind of religious devotion. Alongside deep personal and collective identification with a team is the belief that one's team is supernaturally destined.
Baseball perhaps has the most extended history of religiosity of all American sports. Given baseballs' unique spatio-temporal parameters (uniquely among sports, baseball's spatial dimensions are not territorialized and are uniquely differentiated from park to park. Baseball's temporality is also uniquely not gauged by any mechanized clock but by immanent elements (outs), and in theory, has infinite longevity; a game can possibly never end), it has inspired numerous metaphysical speculations concerning its mythological aspects. (Baseball writer Tom Boswell called baseball America's mythology.)
The first historical instance of a divinely influenced miracle in American sports was the 1914 "Miracle Braves," who went from last place in the National League at midseason to winning the pennant and then sweeping the highly favored and defending champion Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Fifty-five years later, the New York Mets received the moniker "Miracle Mets," after going from 9th place the previous year to first in 1969, culminating with upsetting the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. It was in 1969 that the Mets also inaugurated the phrase, "You Gotta Believe," which was famously displayed by "The Sign Guy" during the Mets next miraculous run four a pennant four years later in 1973. (Fans with signs was rare at that time.)
Believing in the impossible through almost religious fervor is most poignant when related to miracle comebacks, singularly incredible plays, or unfathomable upsets. Famously, as the clock ran out in the "Miracle on Ice" upset of the USSR by the US in the 1980 Olympics, ABC announcer Al Michaels would utter "Do You Believe in Miracles? Yes!"
In 2004, after suffering through 86 years of the so-called "Curse of the Bambino," the Boston Red Sox fans saw their team come from a 3-0 game deficit against their hated rivals, the New York Yankees, and go on to win the World Series. Many of the Red Sox faithful, many of them Roman Catholic, would visit family graves all across New England after that World Series to share the miracle with a long-gone relative.
In pro football, the religious element is more related to miracle plays. The most desperate, last-second miraculous play is itself called a "Hail Mary." In the final seconds of the 1972 AFC playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders, the Steelers Franco Harris made an impossible catch off a ricocheted pass, barely grabbing the ball millimeters from the ground and running for the game-winning touchdown. The play is forever known as "The Immaculate Reception." And then there is the "Music City Miracle" of the 2000 AFC playoffs, when, with 16 seconds left in the game, the Tennessee Titans ran back a kickoff using an impossible lateral pass on the return.
We will surely have more miracles in sports, which points to the interesting fact that it is in sports wherein—in our increasingly secular and technophilic age—faith in miracles still abides.