Aamer Madhani

USA TODAY

CHICAGO — I used to like to think of myself as being too sophisticated to believe in curses, and I have had a bad habit of rolling my eyes when I hear athletes attribute their success to God's direct intervention.

Then on Tuesday afternoon — hours before my beloved Chicago Cubs completed a miraculous ninth-inning rally to win the National League Division Series — my wife texted me a photo of a church marquee with some reassurance for anxious Cubs fans.

"God," the marquee at the Broadway United Methodist Church intoned, "wants the Cubs to win tonight."

I'm still skeptical that a higher power cares about intervening on behalf of professional athletes or their devoted fans, but this long-suffering fan is starting to persuade himself that destiny is really a thing.

How else do you explain Tuesday’s come-from-behind clincher against the San Francisco Giants?

Down three runs with three outs left against a team that has won three World Series in the last five years, the listless Cubs lineup suddenly came alive in what may go down as one of the greatest innings in this hard luck franchise’s history.

The heartache of the long-suffering Chicago Cubs fans should not be underestimated: The scars of a 108-year title drought are thick and permanent.

Players and Cubs management dismiss the notion that the franchise is cursed. Billy Sianis, owner of Chicago's Billy Goat Tavern, famously put a hex on the franchise after then-Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley refused to allow his goat in the ballpark during Game 4 of the 1945 World Series — which the Cubs would go on to lose to the Detroit Tigers and would become the last one they appeared in.

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While the team has dismissed the curse as something for fans, it’s hard for the diehards not to wonder why karma is on a 70-year-old warpath on our emotions.

My heart, like all Cubs fans', has been repeatedly broken. I consider myself lucky to have not yet hit 40, because the wounds are fewer than my older brothers and sisters in misery.

The 1984 Cubs were the first to cause me deep and never fully reconciled pain — blowing a late lead in a decisive game of the National League Championship Series after a ground ball sneaked under the usually sure-fielding first baseman Leon Durham’s glove. Durham’s glove had been doused in Gatorade before the start of the game after Cubs legend Ryne Sandberg inadvertently knocked over a cooler.

I was at Wrigley Field in 2003 to watch the Cubs come within five outs of clinching a National League pennant before collapsing in the “Bartman game,” named for the bespectacled Cubs fan who got in the way of left-fielder Moises Alou as he tried to reach into the stands to catch a fly ball.

And last year, I was certain that a young Cubs team that stormed into the playoffs was headed to the World Series after it advanced to the NLDS against the New York Mets, a team it was 7-0 against during the regular season.

The Mets would dominate the series, sweeping the Cubs in four games in which Mets infielder Daniel Murphy appeared to morph into Babe Ruth.

Yet, here I, along with my brothers and sisters of Cub fandom, stand with our hearts on our sleeves, hopeful that this, at last, is the year.

Our brains tell us that there is plenty of reason to be optimistic about this team.

It won 103 games during the regular season with a deep lineup, baseball’s best starting pitching rotation and a good bullpen that got stronger after a late season trade for the flame-throwing closer Aroldis Chapman. Before the start of the playoffs, the Westgate Las Vegas Superbook put the Cubs at 7-4 odds to win the World Series and even at winning the NL pennant.

On paper, and in the hearts of the diehard fans, this is the best Cubs team in 70 years. Yet, the anxiety persists.

On Tuesday night, with the Cubs down 5-2, I traded texts with two of my oldest friends — brothers who may be more passionate about the Cubs than me — and we found ourselves digitally roiling in our shared misery.

In the bottom of the seventh, I decided to go into the kitchen and take care of the dinner dishes, while listening to a bit of the game on the radio. Maybe if I cleaned the dishes, I thought, some unknown force would work in my Cubbies' favor.

After the game, one of the pals that I’d been texting with told me he’d decided in the ninth to put on the same sweatshirt and socks he had worn during the Cubs' two victories earlier in the series.

I don’t know if it was my pal’s socks or my clean dishes, but I’m pretty certain we did our parts in ensuring that this is the year.

Or maybe it was destiny.

Madhani is USA TODAY's Chicago-based correspondent.