The only thing my friends and I could push out of our near-frosted mouths was one word. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t feel our feet or that we had a 99.9% chance of a miserable walk back to our cars.
With wind whipping around us, a rumble of cheers drowning out our cries, my friends and what seemed like the rest of the residents of section seven howled:
“Believe.”
It was as if NC State football kicker Chris Dunn heard us. Dunn sent his onside kick bounding in front of him and as NC State recovered, Carter-Finley Stadium erupted.
The rest was history — a pair of miraculous NC State touchdowns courtesy of quarterback Devin Leary and wideout Emeka Emezie erased UNC-Chapel Hill’s nine-point lead and its near-100% chance to beat the Wolfpack on Nov. 26, 2021.
We soon found ourselves down on the field, soaking up every part of what I only later realized was one of, if not the best sporting moment of my life.
Four years later, my life and career revolve around sports. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience nearly every up, down and in-between NC State sports has had to offer in those years, plus enough personal sports-watching moments to last me a lifetime. I’ve seen a lot, but nothing as powerful a moment as that night at Carter-Finley in my freshman year.
I always loved sports. But at that moment, I realized sports was so much more, for so many more, than just kicking around a ball. I realized sports are powerful.
I’ve found that for many, sports operates as a religion. It has the power to unite us, to inspire us and to make us believe in something much bigger than ourselves. Very often, it has us believing in something that’s not even realistically possible, such as NC State’s unlikely comeback against the Tar Heels that night.
As you go deeper, you’ll see sports start to permeate every part of our lives in a similar way to religion. We carry around our teams with us on hoodies and hats, check in with them on our social media apps and engage in group chats and hangouts centered around them.
In turn, sports even have ritualistic qualities we often find in organized religion. Events such as the Olympics are ceremonial — between oaths, anthems and the highly devoted athletes that center their lives around their practice, we’ve started to treat sports similarly to religion.
That’s not to say it’s a replacement to organized religion or should actually be classified as one. However, sports have the power to be as ever-present in our lives as religion because of the emotional and societal connection we’ve made with them.
We’ve put sports on a pedestal nearly as central as religion because of the power it brings. Few things other than international competitions such the Olympics or the World Cup bring together people from all over the world like they do. Even if it’s not one of these monumental events, nearly everyone can identify with sports as a universal love language.
While it unites us as a society, sports have the opportunity to provide emotional consistency and support similar to that of religion. Rain or shine, our favorite sports team or league is there for us.
Most importantly, sports are uniquely intertwined with the concept of belief. Like religion, sports have developed an intangible, ethereal quality to them. We often use phrases like “believe” or “keep the faith” when discussing our teams. There’s a reason we often associate sports with so much more than just our brains and brawn, but also our hearts. Sports inspires an unending love in both the athletes that play it and those who watch.
Sports inspires a belief in something bigger than ourselves — sometimes in things that we can only describe as miraculous. What’s more religious than that?
