Maybe you’re not a careful curator of basketball brackets. Maybe you’ve been depressed since your bracket (along with millions of others) was destroyed by the defeat of No. 1 Virginia by No. 16 University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Or maybe you’ve said to yourself already once this week, “If I hear ‘Final Four’ one more time …”

Whoever you are, there have been some remarkable feel-good moments for each of the four remaining teams — from a flying nun to a police-embraced street party — that may kick up your enthusiasm level and help you break a smile, even for the most hesitant of sports fans.

Loyola-Chicago: “God bless, and go Ramblers”

When the Loyola University Chicago Ramblers were invited to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 33 years — and then made it all the way to the Elite Eight — it left brackets shattered.

It’s a classic Cinderella story, and behind every Cinderella, there’s a fairy godmother doing some of the heavy lifting.

In this case, she’s a 98-year-old nun.

Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, otherwise known as Sister Jean, stole the spotlight this year. She has been the team chaplain, full of smiles and spark, for a quarter century. And she has been rooting the Ramblers on for 60 years.

Loyola players huddle around their chaplain before each game. Sister Jean — decked in a pair of custom sneakers that have been called both “Air Jeans” and “Prayer Jordans”— says a prayer covering not only her own team but the opponent as well.

“Good and gracious God,” she begins, according to The New York Times. She asks God to protect the players and to ensure that referees make fair calls, closing her prayer with an “Amen, and go Ramblers!”

She has become so popular that she licensed her name and image for merchandise sales for proceeds that go back to the university and charity. In fact, a bobblehead of Sister Jean is now the all-time top-selling bobblehead made by the Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum. Sister Jean bobbleheads were previously issued in 2011 and 2015. On eBay, someone’s asking $500 for one of those. A new version, due in June and costing $25, can be ordered now.

“I think Sister Jean has really captivated the nation,” Phil Sklar, CEO of the Bobblehead Hall of Fame, told ABC. “Within 24 hours, we sold at least one bobblehead to someone in all 50 states, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom.”

The nun is a former basketballer herself; The Chicago Tribunereports Sister Jean played basketball during high school, before joining the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary convent in Iowa.

She knows hoops.

The Times reports: Loyola-Chicago head coach Porter Moser found a manila folder on his desk his first day as coach in 2011. Inside it was a scouting report, compiled by Sister Jean, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each player he had inherited.

Sister Jean has been in a wheelchair since breaking her hip in November, but that hasn’t stopped her from being the Ramblers’ biggest cheerleader. She’s still on the sidelines, Air Jeans and all.

Michigan: Teamwork makes the dream work

Michigan has the near impossible task of trying to compete with Loyola, not just in their Final Four matchup Saturday but also in best story of the remaining teams.

But Michigan does have quite the story to tell in its own right. The Wolverines flew under the radar early in the season, overlooked and underestimated. And yet, here they are — on a 13-game win streak, no less.

They’ve done it with a combination of good shooting, solid defense and a little bit of luck of the draw. Michigan is a 3-seed, and its highest opponent because of a slew of upsets was sixth-seeded Houston. And against Houston, the Wolverines needed a 3-pointer at the buzzer from a freshman to move on.

Coach John Beilein credits his team’s chemistry and doggedness for its success. “I’ve never seen a team work so hard and be so connected on both ends of the floor, even when things do not go right on the offensive end,” Beilein told The Detroit News.

Beilein has instilled a can-do attitude in his team, but it wasn’t until recently that the players really believed they could go all the way.

“Nah, I’m not gonna lie, I never expected us to make it this far,” junior Charles Matthews told The Detroit News.

Matthews led the Wolverines in scoring with 17 points in Saturday’s win against Florida State.

“But we believe now,” he said, “and that’s where it all starts, with the belief system. … When you have guys like that who are truly your brothers, anything’s possible.”

This is the Wolverines’ eighth trip to the Final Four, but if they win the national championship, it would also be only their second in school history and their first since 1989. The Fab Five team that garnered so much attention for starting five freshmen — an anomaly at the time in college basketball — lost in the 1992 championship game.

They did, however, change the length of basketball shorts forever.

Villanova: Like father, like son

Villanova point guard Jalen Brunson takes after his father. He has been a rising star in the sport — just like his dad, Rick Brunson, a retired NBA player. This is Jalen’s second NCAA tournament. He played as a freshman when Villanova won the national championship.

Rick Brunson didn’t make it past the Elite Eight in his NCAA run playing for Temple — against Michigan. Brunson has said his son was named after Jalen Rose, one of his Michigan opponents and one of the members of the famous Fab Five.

Brunson made a career as an NBA player and is now an assistant coach with the Minnesota Timberwolves. His busy NBA schedule hasn’t allowed him to make every one of son’s games, but he was in the crowd on Sunday, cheering Jalen on as the Wildcats beat Texas Tech to make it to the Final Four.

Through all the celebration, the 21-year-old Jalen found his father in the first row of the stands and they hugged over the barrier, reported The Salem News.

“That was so great — it meant the world to me,” said Jalen to The Salem News. “My dad means so much to me, what he does for me and everything else.”

Kansas: Police-sanctioned party

Sports fans can be rowdy.

In 2013, MLB fans flipped cars after the Red Sox won the World Series. Fans of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles once pelted Santa Claus with snowballs. Celebrations after the Chicago Bulls won NBA championships in 1991 and 1992 led to about 1,000 arrests and $10 million in damage.

But in Lawrence, Kan., when the Kansas Jayhawks made it to the Final Four after six years, the city was in pure — and peaceful — celebration mode, reports USA Today, thanks, in part, to the police.

Thousands of fans poured into the streets for the hours-long celebration. Lawrence Police tweeted an update on March 25: “0 arrests, 0 citations, 1 Final Four appearance.”

And though it seemed that it couldn’t get any better, it did. The celebration became a police-sanctioned party when law enforcement said that it would be more lenient about open-container laws, as long as the beverages were in plastic cups.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk, indeed.

The Michigan Wolverines will play the Loyola-Chicago Ramblers Saturday at 6:09 p.m. ET. The Villanova vs. Kansas game will follow, with tipoff at 8:49 p.m. ET.

Adrienne St. Clair is an intern on NPR’s National Desk; Asia Simone Burns is an intern with NPR Digital News.

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This story comes from Religion News Service. A version originally appeared in USA Today.

“OK, this is it, girls.”

With 41 seconds left in Loyola-Chicago’s Sweet 16 game with Nevada, Sister Mary Fran McLaughlin points out just how close the game is — just like Loyola’s two previous games in this unexpected NCAA Tournament run.

She and two other retired Sisters of the Charity of Blessed Virgin Mary are focused on the flat screen television in their apartment on the northwest side of Chicago, about nine miles from the campus that has become the center of the city’s attention — as much for a charismatic, feisty nun as the basketball team.

“There’s our girl!” said Sister Peggy Geraghty as the camera pans to a friend they’ve known for 50 years.

Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, a fellow BVM and the chaplain for Loyola’s men’s basketball team, is greeting well-wishers at the game in Atlanta. Jean Dolores as they call her, has become the runaway star of the Ramblers’ run, which thanks to a 69-68 win over Nevada has extended to the Elite Eight, and Saturday to the Final Four after their victory over Kansas State.

Geraghty, McLaughlin and Sister Diane O’Donnell can’t believe they are watching their friend become an “international star.” Laughlin and O’Donnell are sitting on a couch, with Schmidt’s bobblehead on the coffee table in front of them. Geraghty pages through the Chicago Tribune, pointing out the full-page ad from Loyola featuring Schmidt’s shoes.

“No one in our community has done anything like this, but this is really unique,” McLaughlin says. “It’s so nice for us, because she’s just one of us!”

Even in retirement, BVM sisters live together, support one another and share meals together. This means helping the 98-year-old Schmidt to her doctor’s appointments — she broke her hip in November — and taking her grocery shopping.

The three sisters don’t follow basketball too closely, and though they have advice for the Ramblers, particularly on rebounding, they ask at one point about what constitutes an offensive foul. They continue to be active in ministry — serving as literacy tutors, helping at the nearby parish and working with Catholic schools and homes for children. Their days are usually too busy to pay attention to basketball but, for Sister Jean, they’ve tuned in.

Halfway through the game, McLaughlin wonders how Loyola’s players are able to keep up with their classes while also dealing with the demands of basketball.

“Jean will be telling them to study!” O’Donnell said.

Schmidt lives in an apartment in a residence hall on Loyola’s campus. The hip injury has hampered her, so she hasn’t been able to lead prayer groups as much as she used to. But she is used to dealing with changes.

‘Everyone works together and no one gets too big’

Loyola’s connection to the BVMs goes back to 1992. Mundelein College, a women-only college, shared a neighborhood with Loyola and was facing dwindling enrollment and skyrocketing costs. It folded into Loyola, and several sisters who had worked as professors and administrators at Mundelein moved to Loyola.

It wasn’t easy for the sisters to say goodbye to the college they founded in 1929, but Schmidt rolled with it.

“She didn’t cry about it. She moved on and took the next job,” O’Donnell said.

At Mundelein, Sister Jean ran the weekend college, served as a dean, and helped run the curriculum for young aspiring sisters. At Loyola, she’s worked in residence halls and with the basketball team. And all of those different jobs means she’s influenced generations of students.

Geraghty, O’Donnell and McLaughlin love being around her on campus to see how she makes everyone feel special.

“If you walk around campus with her, she remembers everyone,” Geraghty says. “She makes everyone feel like they are her favorite.”

The three roommates have worked all over the country as educators and in administrations at different schools and understand just how important Schmidt’s ministry is on Loyola’s campus.

“If you’re on faculty at a school, the kids notice when you’re at the games. It means so much to them, and they thank you the next day,” McLaughlin said.

O’Donnell says the community aspect of their lives as sisters has spilled into how Schmidt guides the team. Loyola plays an unselfish style, passing the ball with precision. Different players have taken key shots in every one of their thrillers.

“She has defined what a team really is. Everybody works together. And it’s so characteristic of what we are,” O’Donnell says. “Everyone works together and no one gets too big.”

“We don’t need anyone to get too fancy pants around us!” McLaughlin adds.

As the game nears its end — the one they wanted — the sisters allow their minds to wander toward a potential conflict that once seemed, even to them, impossible.

“It’s on Holy Saturday,” Geraghty says, referring the the day before Easter, when Catholic churches hold services at night in anticipation of Easter. “The Final Four … it’s on Holy Saturday, but it’s only at 6.”

Now, with Loyola only one win away from a trip to San Antonio, they are allowing themselves to dream not only for them, but for their friend Sister Jean.

Religion News Service

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After weeks of play, four teams are left standing: Villanova, Kansas, Michigan and Loyola-Chicago.

The Villanova Wildcats and Kansas Jayhawks aren’t really a surprise — they were both top seeds heading into the tournament.

They will play each other on Saturday in San Antonio, Texas, and then only one top seeded team will remain. The other semifinal game features No. 3 Michigan Wolverines and No. 11 Loyola-Chicago Ramblers.

The Ramblers may have a bit of an edge. After all, they have Sister Jean Delores Schmidt. If you’ve seen any of their games on TV, the 98-year-old nun is hard to miss.

Sister Jean serves as the chaplain of the basketball team and apparently is a mighty good luck charm and a marketer’s dream.

ESPN reports that Loyola-Chicago officials have asked Sister Jean for permission to license her name and image as demand from licensees came in to the school’s athletic department.

“We weren’t going to do anything until she gave her blessing,” said Tom Sorboro, a senior associate athletic director at the school.

“She didn’t ask for anything for herself,” including compensation, Sorboro said.

“So far, Loyola has approved more than 25 Sister Jean T-shirts from a variety of companies including Fanatics, which made a Final Four shirt with her phrase, “Worship. Work And Win.”

The school also promises more Sister Jean bobbleheads in June — supplies have been depleted for now.

Loyola-Chicago got to the Final Four by defeating Kansas State over the weekend — becoming only the fourth No. 11 seed to reach the Final Four.

As Quinn Klinefelter of member station WDET reports for NPR’s Newscast unit:

“Loyola-Chicago faces a Michigan team whose big men Moe Wagner and Duncan Robinson helped the Wolverines squeeze past Florida State.

It took overtime and a career game from Malik Newman for Kansas to get past Duke to reach the semifinals — they came just short of the past two years.

They meet Villanova, a team of prolific scorers that relied on defense to out-muscle Texas Tech.”

Villanova won the national title two years ago. Juniors Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges were on that championship team. They are now the Wildcats leading scorers.

In 2008, Kansas won the championship. Since then, they have been seeded No. 1 five times but failed to make the Final Four any of those times.

Michigan State last won the title in 1989. They had a 13-game winning streak this season which is only second to Loyola-Chicago which won 14 straight.

The last time Loyola-Chicago won the championship was in 1963.

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In 2009, the former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon took on the NCAA in a lawsuit that challenged the organization’s ability to profit from the likenesses of college athletes in a video game. But as the case heated up, its stakes and scope began to sprawl, and opened a can of worms that threatened to upend one of the bedrock principles of college sports: amateurism.

“I wanted…to get the NCAA to at least admit that they were wrong in using former players likeness for profit, and that eventually branched off into current players owning their likeness and why they should.” O’Bannon said to me on the Code Switch podcast. “Then it branched off later into actual current players getting paid from the universities and from the NCAA – not only basketball and football, but all athletes. Men and women.”

The NCAA will make $771 million from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this year. The coaches at the biggest basketball schools have average salaries around $3 million. But most Americans are not on board with the idea that the men who play the games should be paid.

There’s a racial split here: a majority of white people oppose paying college athletes while a majority of black people are in favor. As we learned on the podcast, racial resentment toward African-Americans is a very strong predictor of opposition to paying student-athletes. (And let’s not forget the racial optics of the NBA’s “one-and-done rule,” by which most of the very best pro basketball prospects must spend a year masquerading as undergraduates because the NBA bars them from entry until they’re a year out of high school.)

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at Cardozo Law School in New York City (and a huge fan of University of Michigan sports) offered a somewhat counterintuitive take on all this in New Yorker essay, “Why N.C.A.A. Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid.” Yankah believes the current system is unfair and rife with exploitation, but believes that paying college athletes would essentially just entrench that arrangement.

Below is an edited version of our conversation with him on the Code Switch podcast episode, “The Madness of March.”

Code Switch: Walk us through what you think might happen if we paid college athletes.

Ekow Yankah: I think paying college athletes is almost certainly bad for the athletes, terrible for the universities, and terrible for the sports they play. Other than that, it’s a great idea. There’s very little reason to think that a young athlete’s life will be in any substantial way better if they become, so to speak, employees of the university.

Of course, many of these young men are under tremendous financial difficulty. I understand that a good number of them come from backgrounds which are difficult or even impoverished, and I’m well aware that the demands of big time college sports. But almost all college sports are so consuming that there seems something unfair about their having to balance these two projects.

The problem is that paying them doesn’t help relieve that stress, paying them only makes it the case that that stress seems justified. Paying college athletes will almost certainly exacerbate a problem that has been going on for generations, where athletes of a certain number of sports are seen as ever more divided from the actual student body. They’re seen as tangential. They’re seen as not real students. And, indeed, given that they will then have to trade some of the minimal protections that they have as student athletes in order to simply be employees of the university, at least in some capacity. It seems like a pretty raw deal. All of this, by the way, is in exchange for what it would actually be, for the vast majority of athletes, a remarkably small amount of money on the free market.

CS: You’re saying that the best players would get the most money but most players would get a pittance, if it was not equalized.

EY:The point is that it’s awfully hard to project which kids will be superstars. So outside of the small number of “can’t-miss” prospects, most kids will actually be paid on some scale that reflects the deep uncertainty about how good they’ll be. And if we want to see what that looks like, we don’t have to use our imagination. We can look at the minor leagues: minor league basketball, minor league baseball, and minor league hockey. Most of these young people are working nonstop. Most of them are just as talented, if not more talented than the vast majority of college athletes. Most of them are paid roughly what a Starbucks barista is paid. And in exchange for all that, they give up their opportunity to go to college, to pursue their dreams, and to turn out to not be a 20 year-old superstar but maybe a 40 year-old functioning adult.

CS: You say that there is a racial component to the way that people think about the minor league systems, and the prospect of paying student-athletes in men’s basketball and football.

EY: One thing I worry about is this argument that, “well, these students aren’t really students, anyway. So let’s just pay them.” And I do think that has a racial component. It’s not entirely racial, of course. Part of it is that people are well aware and turned off by the huge financial incentive that the universities have.

But it’s also true that there are a ton of different students on every college campus who are not straight-A math students. Somehow when we think about young black athletes and what they do, the sort of physical talent that they bring is not valued the same way that the ballerina’s is or the chess player’s is, or the musician’s is — and I do find that worrying. I wonder why it is that these are multi-talented people whose skills may not be at its highest in science class is so quickly dismissed.

It’s very clear that the true developmental league of the NBA is currently college basketball. The true developmental league of the NFL is entirely college football. And, somehow, the answer seems to be, “disconnect these students from education” rather than, “why don’t we do what we do with other sports and set up a robust semi-pro league.” One that would allow some students, those who are actually involved and engaged, to remain student-athletes and allow those for whom being a student athlete has no part of their project to go on to do what they want to do.

CS: But it seems like even with that system [where minor leagues for football and basketball exist alongside the traditional college system for those sports], there’s still a lot of kids – who have no illusions about the fact that that they’re not going to go pro, who will go to college, and who will try to make the most of their college experience. And that they will still generate tons of revenue for those colleges while they personally struggle financially because they can’t be paid. I’m just curious what happens to those kids.

EY: I think that’s a great question and it gets the heart of how complex and hard this is. If you’re a student athlete who comes to Michigan well aware that you’re never going to professional, then there’s a real sense in my mind’s eye that you will make the deal that makes being a student-athlete worth it. That is to say, that your education will actually be valuable to you in a way that matters. You’ll be much less likely to be fooled or to trade on these fumes of dreams that allow school after school to give college athletes empty classes with no value that end up with empty degrees with no value.

I am not interested in a bunch of young men who work for three or four years for a university making a minor league salary. Which, if people actually looked at what that would be, is quite minimal. I’m interested in the next generation of doctors and lawyers and bankers. And in particular, for the sports that are dominated by African-American men, I’m deeply interested in the next generation of black doctors, black lawyers, and black bankers, rather than kids who are seduced into trading that for making spending money from 18 to 22.

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