For those of you who have been busier with other things, or just refuse to pay for Xfinity’s new sports package, the Washington Huskies defeated the Texas Longhorns in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day. The win was classic Huskies: They were both dominant and panic-inducing as they advanced to a spot in the National Championship game against the Michigan Wolverines. 

That title game, which will be played in Houston on Monday, will be one of the biggest in Seattle’s short—and if we’re being brutally forthright, mostly unsuccessful—sports history. We just haven’t had many winner-take-all championship games here, at the amateur or professional level. The Mariners, for example, have never played in one, as they’ve never reached the World Series. The Seahawks have reached a few Super Bowls, but even that is a competition among 32 teams, not the 133 schools aiming for immortality in the modern version of college football. 

And now it’s all boiled down to two—and soon, one.  One team is going to take home a National Championship. One team is not, and if it’s not the Huskies, it will be heartbreaking. 

But even if they do come up short, all that caring just might be worth it because of how likable this team is. Their coach, Kalen DeBoer, who rose in the college football ranks from a tiny school in South Dakota, seems to balance an aw-shucks personality with a mix of cool school counselor and dad of the friend who let you have parties when he wasn’t home vibes. 

His quarterback, Michael Penix Jr. has quickly established himself as not just one of the best players in Washington history, but one of the easiest to root for. There’s a reason Seahawks fans are clamoring for the team to draft him. His brazen wide receiver core includes three guys who would be the number one on just about any other team: Jalen McMillan, Ja’Lynn Polk, and Rome Odunze, who may be the greatest receiver in the history of the school. All will likely be looking for targets from an NFL quarterback next fall.

The offensive line, which was voted the best in the country, features an impressive combination of power and grace. Penix’s backfield partner, running back Dillon Johnson, has seemed to be playing on one foot for the last six weeks due to injury, and has still somehow managed to establish himself as a massive part of the best offense in college football. 

While the defense lacks star power—all due respect to Bralen Trice and Jabbar Muhammad—and has frustrated fans at times, it also seems to step up when it has to. There's no better example of that than the final play of the Sugar Bowl, when Elijah Jackson, a player who has been been picked on both by opposing quarterbacks and by fans alike this season, swatted a pass out of the end zone to preserve a victory as time expired. You don’t win nine straight games by 10 points or less without making the big plays defensively.

And then there’s this: When they take the field in Houston, the Huskies will take on a team they have history with. Oh, do they have history. Washington and Michigan have squared off against each other 13 times since 1978, with the Wolverines winning eight of those contests, including their most recent battle in 2021. That doesn't come close to telling you the whole story, however. The Huskies and Wolverines have met four times in the Rose Bowl—the granddaddy of them all—with the schools splitting the contests. Washington’s last win over Michigan in Pasadena saw them claim a share of the National Championship in 1991. Michigan’s last win there over the Huskies came in the last game for legendary coach Don James. Washington has struggled to ever reach those heights again, until now. 

Oh, and the man coaching Michigan on Monday? The man wearing the khakis and a hat that doesn’t seem to fit quite right? The man suspended earlier this year by his conference for an alleged sign-stealing scheme? That’d be Jim Harbaugh. You might remember Harbaugh as the former coach of Stanford who pummeled the Huskies on several occasions, but you probably remember him best as the former coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Yep, that’s the guy who was patrolling the sidelines for the enemy in the 2013 NFC Championship Game; arguably the biggest win to ever take place in Seattle sports history—a game that ended with a tipped pass that wasn’t all that dissimilar to the one that ended Washington’s Sugar Bowl victory over Texas.

It can be easy at times to overstate the importance of an athletic event, to get caught up in the hyperbole and pageantry of it all. But it may not be possible to overstate the significance of the one that will take place Monday between Michigan and Washington.