Belief without evidence

It's a pretty cool thing. To have the faith in yourself and your teammates that things will work out, no matter how bleak they may seem at the time, is a special trait.
Shaun Green has it, and it's rubbing off on his team.
By now, anyone reading this blog or anything in the paper under my name knows the story. Green was sitting in the rain after CCSU's latest gut-wrenching loss, the season seemingly over. A year in which Green had worked himself to the bone getting the biggest recruiting class in school history, acquiring corporate sponsors and doing everything he could think of to raise the program's stature had gone up in smoke.
"At one point we were 2-8-2 and I was thinking to myself, how can this be," Green said. "How can so many people put in so much work and not get any rewards for it?"
Still, Green never let his team stop working as hard as he and his staff were. The program kept plugging. Now, eight incredible games later, the Blue Devils are a win away from the Sweet 16.
"There's a thing in life called belief without evidence," Green said. "Religion is founded upon it. People believe in God but they haven't seen him. I believe in God, but I haven't met God. I believe in UFOs. There's 260 million planets in a galaxy and 260 million galaxies. There's got to be something out there, however I've never seen a UFO. My point is this: These guys believed in this team when the evidence didn't point to it."
While the science and math might be off, all the statistics, starting with the team records, indicated that Central had the worst team in the league. But the Blue Devils were undaunted.
"Don't ever let anyone tell you that you're finished," Green told his team.
It didn't. Seven wins and a tie later, CCSU is the conference champion and the first men's team in school history to win a NCAA game. Now it's up to Tulsa to try and tell the Devils they're finished.
The Blue Devils don't believe that will happen. But no matter what the result is on Wednesday night, this team has been given the rewards it so badly searched for in October.
"It's validation," Green said. "In anything you do in life you always look for some form of validation so that whatever you do has some worth to it. What we did by beating Harvard was validate all our work."
They've also given us all evidence that belief is all you need sometimes.