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For Patriot fans, luck is just part of the game plan

Superstitious fans know they have to do their part

Team jerseys on game day are a must for superstitious fan Matt Quesenberry of Easton and his wife, Sara, and kids, Benjamin, 3, and Georgia, 15 months. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

After spending six years as the wife of a seriously superstitious Patriots fan, Sara Quesenberry has learned to set limits. That means she will watch Sunday’s Super Bowl wearing the unflattering men’s Tom Brady jersey that her husband, Matthew, considers lucky. But she will not put on her Pats earrings.

“If they won when I had those things on, I’d never get them off. I’d have Pats logos hanging from my ears forever,” said Quesenberry, 40, of Easton, a doctor, like her spouse. “I have to be very careful.”

When the Patriots play the Seattle Seahawks, Brady will be calling the plays on the field. But off the field, fans prone to magical thinking will also be quarterbacking: dictating who can sit where, whether Mom can or cannot enter the room during a Patriots drive, which talismanic snacks are on the menu — even what the dog can wear.

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“The one game Rudy didn’t have his Pats bandanna on, they lost,” said Michelle Abdow, of Longmeadow, referring to her Weimaraner.

Analysts blamed that loss, in a meaningless December game against the Buffalo Bills, on the Patriots’ resting their top players. The Abdows traced the defeat to their 9-year-old pet and a pregame tussle that left his bandanna tattered.

“It was shredded so I threw it away,” admitted Abdow, 43, the owner of a marketing firm. When the enormity of her act became clear — the Pats lost, 17-9 — she pulled the dog’s logo wear from the trash. It needs to be washed, but Patriots Nation can relax.

“He’s not taking it off until after the Super Bowl,” Abdow vowed.

Sara Quesenberry is careful about when she wears her Pats earrings.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

Considering that we live in a world in which air seeps mysteriously out of footballs, could it be that unseen forces truly are at work, and the superstitious fans are the ones who have it right?

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Alas, a wide range of experts say that wearing lucky underwear, sending mind messages through the TV, changing jerseys midgame if the Patriots are losing — none of it has any impact.

“It doesn’t matter whether you come in dressed as Tom Brady or Bob Kraft,” said Las Vegas bookie Jimmy Vaccaro of the South Point sports book. “We don’t pay attention to it. It’s not going to change the outcome of the game.”

But humans — just like our beloved pets — can’t help but think that our actions are directing events.

“We see this same behavior in animals,” said Terri Bright, director of behavior services at MSPCA/Angell Animal Medical Center.

“One of the most common is the dog who barks at the mail carrier. The mail carrier isn’t going away because the dog barks” — he is going to the next house — “but from the dog’s perspective, it works every time, like a charm.”

Even for fans who know their actions do not really have an impact on the field, faith trumps facts.

“I’m a man of science, not superstition,” said Matthew Quesenberry, a hematologist at Rhode Island Hospital, “but when it comes to the Pats, I can’t intellectualize it.”

Neither can Jason Norton, 31, a financial analyst. Even though he spends workdays looking at cold hard numbers, he also “knows” that the Pats lost to Buffalo because he was not at the sports bar where he has watched all the other games — one of 12 buddies sitting in the same spots in the same booth for each game, drinking the same shots, high-fiving with left hands only.

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With kickoff a day away, Patriot players are studying Seahawk game films, practicing plays, and working out. On his end, Norton, a New England transplant living in Chicago, is also doing the hard work required for victory.

“We have the same server at the bar every week,” he said. “His name is Pat. We’ve confirmed that he’s working on [Super Bowl] Sunday.”

Michelle Abdow and her Weimaraner, Rudy, who has to wear his tattered Patriots bandanna until after the big game.Matthew Cavanaugh for The Boston Globe/Globe Freelance

A 2013 study of 1,661 college students found that not only did 40 percent of subjects engage in a least one superstitious behavior, but “in their hearts, they believed what they did mattered,” said researcher Daniel Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State University in Kentucky.

“They felt they’d be to blame if their team lost and they hadn’t gone through their rituals,” said Wann. “Humans have a really powerful need for control, and the poor sport fans, they care so much, but they can’t do anything, bless their hearts.”

Coming off two high-stakes playoff games, against the Baltimore Ravens and the Indianapolis Colts, some fans’ behavior has become so extreme that onlookers are wondering if they have turned into the real-world version of Robert De Niro’s character in “Silver Linings Playbook,” a Philadelphia Eagles fan so obsessive he thinks the positioning of his TV remote controls has an impact on the team’s success.

But if wearing unwashed “lucky” garments for an entire season is considered normal, how can you tell if a person has crossed a line?

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David H. Barlow, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Boston University, and founder of the school’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, offered a simple guide: “If it’s beginning to interfere with your life, if you’re making your spouse furious, annoying your friends, or unable to do something else on game day that you know needs to be done, then maybe it’s time to get help.”

Some fans come to their superstitious behavior as adults. Others, like Lisa Frattini, 45, of Newton, learn it as children.

“My dad was, and continues to be, a huge New York Giants fan,” Frattini said. “As a kid, I’d be sitting on the couch, and I’d have to go to the bathroom, but if the Giants were driving and I was in the ‘lucky’ seat, he’d make me wait.”

Delaying the visit, she said, was better than triggering a defeat. “My dad was such a bear when the Giants lost that I was happy to do it.”

Fast-forward several decades to the Jan. 18, 2015, game against the Colts. Frattini was to be a guest at the same Belmont home where pals had watched the Ravens game. She had arrived about 15 minutes late, which — in the logic of the magical-thinking set — meant that she should also come late to the Colts game.

“I was fine with it,” she said, describing how she circled the block to kill time. “If it’s going to help a win, I’m happy to do anything.”

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Beth Teitell can be reached at bteitell@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @bethteitell.