CHICAGO — Each prayer begins the same way, with “Good and gracious God.” Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt always makes sure of that.

But it is in the words that follow that Sister Jean, the 98-year-old nun who serves as the team chaplain for Loyola University-Chicago’s NCAA Tournament-bound men’s basketball team, really finds her voice.

She asks for God’s protection for the players.

She asks for the referees to call fouls “justly.”

She asks that the Ramblers execute the plays the way they were intended.

The prayers are anything but bipartisan.

“I ask God to be especially good to Loyola so that, at the end of the game, the scoreboard indicates a big ‘W’ for us,” she said.

Coach Porter Moser and his players had the most to do with Loyola’s bid to go to the NCAA Tournament this week, the program’s first appearance in the field in 33 years. But even they acknowledge that Sister Jean’s presence and influence are undeniable.

She has her own plaque in the university’s hall of fame. She has had her own bobblehead night. And inside the weight room at Loyola’s athletic center, Sister Jean’s words, “Worship, work, win,” are displayed prominently. But it is the words painted on another wall outside of Gentile Arena — a quote from St. Ignatius of Loyola — that may better point to the power of her personality:

Go forth and set the world on fire.

“She exemplifies that,” Moser said. “She lights up every room she goes into. She’s always smiling. She has an energy about herself. I connect with that.”

The connection between Sister Jean and Moser, 49, dates to 2011, when Moser, a career assistant, was hired to revitalize Loyola’s program. On his first day, he arrived at his new office and found a manila folder on his desk. Inside it was a scouting report, compiled by Sister Jean, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each player he had inherited.

The scouting reports have not stopped. Day after day, season after season, Sister Jean pores over box scores of Loyola’s upcoming opponents, weighing what she finds against her insider’s knowledge of Loyola’s players. She is careful to note the smallest of details, which she conveys when she stands in a huddle to pray with her arms wrapped around players’ waists. The moments, she said, are not as holy as some might guess: In between invocations, she also warns the players to watch out for the opponent’s top performers.

But it is there, in the huddle, surrounded by players who tower over her, that Sister Jean can feel the goodness of the players enveloping her.

“They’re very special, and they’re very good,” she said. “These kids play with their hearts and their heads because they love their school and because they love basketball.”

After each Loyola game, Sister Jean sends emails to Moser, to his coaching staff and then to each player. She limits her written words to the team to only a few paragraphs, she said, but then always adds a personalized message congratulating a player for his performance or encouraging the downtrodden.

“There’s been days throughout my last four years when I had a bad game, a down game,” Loyola senior Donte Ingram said. “We might have won. We might have lost. But at the end of the message, she always found a way to make me feel better.”

Before she fell and broke her left hip on Nov. 14, Sister Jean had missed only two Loyola home games since 1994. She typically makes her way around campus in a pair of custom maroon basketball sneakers with her name stitched in gold thread on the back. When she was forced to miss eight home games this season after surgery to repair her hip, Sister Jean followed the play-by-play coverage of Ramblers games on her iPad, envisioning each play without the luxury of a video feed.

And despite her absence, the prayers, the emails and the scouting reports never missed a beat.

Restricted to a wheelchair, she even made her way to St. Louis to watch — and pray — as Loyola won the Missouri Valley Conference tournament title.

“I promised God a lot of stuff,” she said of her nonstop prayers during the final. “So I had to take care of that before I went to sleep that night.”

On Sunday evening, she was back with her team at Loyola’s watch party, wearing an oversize Loyola varsity jacket and a maroon and gold scarf. She took copious notes throughout the television broadcast that announced the brackets, and she cried tears of joy when Moser and the Ramblers learned that they would be the 11th seed in the South Region, matched against 22-9 Miami (Florida) on Thursday in Dallas.

With one more medical clearance from doctors, Sister Jean will head to Texas to cheer on her beloved Ramblers. If her health prevents the trip, she said, she will watch on television. It is the same way she watched Loyola’s greatest basketball moment: a 60-58 victory over two-time defending champion Cincinnati in the 1963 national championship game.

“I know she’s going to be there with us in prayer and cheering us on,” Ingram said. “And that means a lot to us.”