Why is praying for the past wrong?

Abstract I begin with the intuition that there is something wrong with praying for the past, for example, praying for a basketball team to win after the game has ended. My aim is to find a philosophical explanation for why this is wrong. I explore three explanations for the wrongness in praying for the past, reject the first two, and offer a third. The first is based on the idea that prayer for the past is inefficacious. This assumption turns out to be mistaken. The second relies on religious considerations; I reject this explanation since it is too narrow and does not explain the initial intuition. I then argue that prayer for past events is wrong in virtue of being an unwarranted response, similar to how emotions can be unwarranted. I use concepts from the philosophy of fittingness to articulate my explanation.