I always wondered why it is that people feel pride when a local sports team wins. I’m not talking about big fans, but people who might not even be able to name one player on the team. For example, if a little league team from Brooklyn goes to the Little League World Series, everybody in Brooklyn, and even throughout NY, is so proud of them even though they had never even known of their existence until now. But when they hear that this “local” team won, they feel pride. This seems to be a natural thing that people feel a connection to the people who they have some sort of “shaychus” to. This shaychus can be that they live in the same city or country (olympics) or it could be that they are somehow “related”. That same pride can be felt about “family” even if it is family that you’ve never met. And all Jews are “family”.
This doesn’t have anything to do with Judaism itself, it is just a natural feeling. Once a person has that feeling you can try to use it to bring them closer to the religious part of the religion.