Dallas Kilponen will be watching Cubs postseason games as he has watched every other game this season, and the season before that, and the one before that.

Alone.

He'll probably warm up for the game by hooking his computer up to his big-screen TV and playing the Katie Day video "We Got the Fire," the Cubs' postseason hype song, because it gives him goosebumps. He'll wear his Ernie Banks T-shirt or his 1915 replica jersey, the '80s throwback or the standard home and away. If he's in the right mood, it'll be the Cubs' party shirt, the one with hot dogs and logos from different eras that his wife, remarkably, loves. He'll definitely have on his new 39/30 fitted classic "C" cap. And he'll be holding his good luck game ball from the Cubs-Phillies game in 2010, when Chicago won 12-6 with 16 hits.

He'll check the weather forecast and get nervous if it's chilly because of how he thinks it might have affected the Cubs in the NLCS against the Mets last year. Then he'll tweet a little and maybe read some of his favorite Cubs bloggers.

He might call up to his wife, Fiona, who will be supportive but will make her own plans for the day. She will leave him alone on the couch, where the 51-year-old from Sydney, Australia, will hold down his city and, for all intents and purposes, his continent as the biggest Cubs fan Down Under.

There's another guy in Melbourne, a one-and-a-half-hour plane ride away, with whom Kilponen exchanges the occasional tweet. He thinks there's another in Wollongong, a 90-minute drive from Sydney. Once, Kilponen craved Cubs fellowship so badly that he put out the word on social media and on the "Ivy Envy" podcast for a meet-up at the Forresters, a Sydney pub where you can have a beer at 10 in the morning and watch live American sports. He offered free hamburgers and hot dogs.

No one replied.

Dallas Kilponen's wife, Fiona, has attended two games at Wrigley Field with her husband. "It really, truly is a religious experience with him," she said. Courtesy Dallas Kilponen

And so the father of two channels Ernie and watches the beloved by himself on his MLB package. He listens to Pat and Ron, Len and J.D. And he lives for his frequent trips to Chicago, the first in 2006, his first major league game, when the Earth's rotation paused for just a second and the sports photographer who spent 24 years with the Sydney Morning Herald knew one thing for sure.

"I was so filled with emotion when I walked on those grounds," he said, "I was like, 'Oh my God. This is my team.' I'd always known about the Cubs and how desperate their lot was to win the World Series, but when I went to Wrigley, it was so physically overwhelming to stand there and look at the ivy and see the scoreboard. I was transported to another time and almost instantly connected.

"People talk about it being spiritual and magical. For me, it was like seeing the light."

Kilponen played baseball in elementary school, taught by a gym teacher who loved the game and started a league, and Kilponen played until he began working as a professional photographer.

There's a long history of baseball in Australia, dating to the 1850s, when American gold miners first brought the game there. But it was cricket that became the nation's summer sport, while baseball, even with its Australian Baseball League, jointly owned by Major League Baseball, was delegated to minor sports status among Australian fans.

For Kilponen, Australians' love of the underdog only cemented his devotion to the Cubs. "It so resonated with me," he said. "Why wouldn't you root for the Cubs?"

He wants to make one thing clear, and that is although he respects the lifetime bond most Cubs fans have with their team and acknowledges that is not him, he will not cop to the bandwagon label.

"I was so filled with emotion when I walked on those grounds," Dallas Kilponen said of Wrigley Field. "I was like, 'Oh my God. This is my team.'" Courtesy Dallas Kilponen

"They've been pretty awful for my 10 years," he said of his relationship with the team. "I remember when they were playing the Marlins, and I was sitting in the bleachers with my mates drinking beer, and Carlos Marmol threw 14 balls in a row to lose. My heart sunk. ... I've seen a lot of heartbreak."

He has also seen some wins close-up. "I'm very proud of my 9-3 record," he said with a laugh. "I feel like I'm their good luck charm."

A few years ago, after listening to the Ivy Envy podcast, Kilponen emailed the hosts to let them know they had a fan in Australia, and they struck up a friendship. The hosts invited him to voice an intro for the show inviting fans from all over the world to listen in.

This summer, Kilponen met one of the hosts, Corey Fineran, in Chicago, and the two arranged to go to some games together. Fineran, a 39-year-old from Galesburg, Illinois, whose day job is writing curriculum for special education students, had to drop something off in the Cubs' front office and invited Kilponen to come along. The Cubs and specifically communications manager Kevin Saghy were so charmed by the affable Aussie that they loaded him with souvenirs and credentialed him to shoot a game with the Cubs' staff photographer.

"Kevin gave him a W flag [the Cubs' victory flag flown at Wrigley Field after every home win], and Dallas was getting choked up," Fineran said. "For me, like so many Cubs fans, it was my grandparents who are gone now who turned me onto the team, and situations like this year has me thinking about them. But I really enjoyed seeing that reaction from Dallas because it was so pure to know it was coming from his love of the team and the city and not because it reminded him of a family member."

Seeing Kilponen enraptured with Wrigley, singing during the seventh-inning stretch, cheering on the team, made him remember how special a place it is.

"After going there so many times, you lose that childlike enthusiasm, but with him, it was so authentic, and it really impacted me," Fineran said. "He took me back to that time seeing Wrigley for the first time."

Dallas' wife, Fiona, confesses to hating sports, but when your husband makes you take his picture in front of an ivy-covered wall while on vacation in Italy because "it looks just like Wrigley," you realize he has another love in his life.

Fiona has been to two games, the first in rain and the second in full-blown Chicago August heat.

"I feel like I'm their good luck charm," Kilponen said of the Cubs, who are 9-3 in games he has attended at Wrigley Field. Courtesy Dallas Kilponen

"It really, truly is a religious experience with him," she said. "That first time when it was raining, he was upset I hadn't enjoyed the experience because to him, the weather and conditions meant nothing. His attitude was, 'What? You're not enjoying this? We're at the Cubs' game.'"

Kilponen is enthralled, among other things, by the way the light "filters through the lower and upper deck. There's just something about that place that gets me every time.

"I've covered Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games and Rugby World Cups, so I've seen big moments, and I don't get overwhelmed that easily," he said. "I think I was just blown away by the sheer beauty of that field. I was 40 the first time I saw it. And it's that classic thing we love about baseball, and I love that about Americans' connection with fathers and sons and grandfathers.

"But I just walked in and felt this warm connection between the field and the fans, and it was everything about baseball that I love encapsulated."

Fiona said if the Cubs make it to the Series, she would "sanction" a trip to Chicago. "If he got a ticket, he would be there in a heartbeat, and I wouldn't begrudge that at all," she said. "But he would just be pleased [for the team] to get to that point."

A ticket might not be necessary.

"I'd be straight to the airport and straight up there," he said. "Even if I could just hang out in Wrigleyville. ... I'm telling a lot of people who know nothing about baseball, 'Get ready. You're going to see this on the news in Australia because it will be one of the biggest sports stories in history.' I think they're kind of interested. It's not hard to sell people on an underdog story like this one."

Of course, there's a chance Dallas Kilponen will do the same thing he did that night when he invited Cubs fans to a party and no one came.

"I ended up watching at home and screaming alone in my living room when the Cubs beat the Cardinals," he said. "It's weird that I can't celebrate with anyone. I want to go out to a bar with a couple thousand people and spray beer all over each other."

Instead, with a full day still ahead of him after most games end and with a full head of energy, he'll try to dissect things with a friend who doesn't much care that he loves Joe Maddon because "he doesn't muck around."

Then Kilponen will do what any self-respecting Cubs fan in Sydney, Australia, does when he doesn't want to drink with the flies (that's Aussie for alone).

"I just go for a surf instead."