DUBUQUE, Iowa — A former mayor of this town lives here on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, with about 180 other retired members of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Several other residents were college presidents, including one who was appointed by President Nixon to a White House task force on women’s rights and responsibilities.

Now these nuns, the B.V.M.s, as they like to be called, have a college basketball celebrity in their midst, too, if only in spirit and bobblehead form: Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the 98-year-old chaplain for the Loyola-Chicago men’s team, an 11th seed that pulled off two upsets last week to advance to the round of 16 in the N.C.A.A. tournament.

Many of the retired nuns living here at the order’s headquarters planned to drop everything to watch Loyola play against seventh-seeded Nevada on Thursday night in Atlanta. The gathering was certain not to be your typical March Madness viewing party.

And then again …

“When we watch Loyola play, yes, sometimes people do yell at the television — some more than others,” Sister Bernadette McManigal, 83 and a former superintendent of schools for the diocese in Arlington, Va., said on Wednesday.