There was a tournament like that once. It started 29 years ago to the day. Which is a coincidence, because Saturday is when Michigan basketball’s Juwan Howard coaches his first NCAA tournament game. What makes it a coincidence is that Howard was part of that team 29 years ago that had America’s attention.

A big part.

Howard was the first big name recruited to the class of Michigan freshmen that would forever be known as the Fab Five. After he came, Ray Jackson and Jimmy King came. After they came, Jalen Rose and Chris Webber came.

And in March of 1992, for the first time in history, five freshmen — those five freshmen — were going to start a NCAA tournament game.

So on Wednesday, in a zoom call, I asked Howard what he remembered about that moment.

“Well, if you look” — he touched his scalp — “there’s many gray hairs that’s on top of my head. Many gray hairs on my goatee. So that means yes there’s wisdom, but I’m aging. So that means my memory is lost. … So I don’t recall what happened during that time 29 years ago.”

He paused. “I’m just kidding you.”

Meeting with The Greatest

He had to be kidding, because nobody could forget that weekend in Atlanta. It began with the Wolverines in the Omni hotel, hanging over the balconies and yelling to a guest who was standing a few floors below. That guest was Muhammad Ali, who happened to be staying at the same hotel. Recognizing the already famous freshmen, he beckoned them to come down.

Next thing they knew, the Wolverines were in Ali’s suite, where they spent at least an hour talking, marveling, joking, and, of course, trash talking.

“I hear Tyson said he coulda whupped you,” Rose cracked.

Ali lifted his head and stared at Jalen. His voice and mannerisms were slowed by Parkinson’s disease, but not his wit.

“I wish … I was a dog …” Ali said, “and you … was a tree.”

Everybody cracked up. When they went to leave, the players shook Ali’s hand, one by one. When Juwan got close, Ali pulled him in and whispered in his ear, “Shock the world.”

They would. Infused with Ali’s message, the team was pumped for greatness. Webber and Rose decided to shave off their hair, and arrived for the first game with smooth scalps.

“It was a very exciting time for all of us,” Howard recalled Wednesday. “being that it was our first NCAA tournament. We looked forward to that moment back in October when we first started. … Fast forward (through) all the adversity … and we ended up in Atlanta.

“Yes, we met Muhammad Ali which was an amazing time … hanging out in his room. And then leading up to the first game versus Temple. Temple was called as the favorite to win that game (with their) matchup zone, but we did an amazing job of competing from start to finish. There was excitement, nervous energy — but when that jump ball started the game took off … all that nervous energy went out the window. It was all about embracing the competition.”

The Wolverines would win that first game, 73-66, exactly 29 years ago Saturday, despite Temple’s crazy defense, its tough reputation and its loud and spirited coach John Cheney, who afterwards wasn’t all that impressed.

“They overcame mistakes tonight,” Cheney said of the Fab Five, who scored all but two of the baskets for U-M, “but I don’t know if they can overcome those same mistakes against an equally talented team.”

Well, he was slightly off. The Fab Five went all the way to the championship game, when they lost to to Duke. Before and after — and sometimes during — the tournament games, Juwan could be seen clenching his fists, pulling his arms tightly and shouting, “Shock the world!”

Now he tries to do it again.

Learn from history

What’s funny is, with all that history in his satchel, Howard doesn’t dip into it. “I haven’t talked about my experience playing in the tournament at all,” he admitted.

And when I asked star freshman Hunter Dickinson if he had asked his coach, at this fortuitous moment, to tell him when he went through as a freshman center in his first tournament game, Dickinson replied, “That’s a good question. I haven’t really asked him anything about playing in the national championship or really much about his run. I probably should. That’s good. Thank you for reminding me.”

Uh, you’re welcome.

Ah, well. it may be that memories mean more to those who watch than those who play. And Howard, who has done a magnificent job this year, knows better than to live inside a past that his players — who weren’t yet born during the Fab Five run — can hardly relate to.

But history smiles, even when ignored. Saturday, Howard will try to do what he and his famous teammates once tried to do — kick in the doors of college basketball’s biggest event and march all the way to center stage in his very first try.

It won’t shock the world this time — Michigan is, after all, a No. 1 seed — but it would definitely, as his old team did 29 years ago, make a big impression.

But what if you could?

Voila! It’s one year ago, March of 2020, and the World Health Organization is about to tell the planet that COVID-19 is a “pandemic.” It is the start of a war that will feature countless battles. Many will suffer. Many will die. Many will wish we knew things sooner.

Here then are some things we could warn our 2020 selves about: 

America, we are going to lose almost as many people in this war than all the combat deaths from World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined. Take it seriously.

We are also about to have no clue, at the beginning, of how to win it. Take that seriously, too.

The most innocent of settings are about to turn deadly. Cruise ships will infect thousands. Weddings will become superspreaders. Elderly people, our most precious resource of love, wisdom and experience, are about to become the most vulnerable targets.

We won’t know exactly how this virus started, and we’ll be denied certain critical information. As a result, we are about to embark on a series of decisions, some of them hasty, some of them dire, many of them coming from microwaved science or political hysteria. We should be skeptical. And we should not punish people who express their skepticism, because many “experts” will be proven wrong. 

We are about to be warned, by our top health officials, that between 100,000 to 240,000 Americans may die from this disease. That will prove way too low. We are about to be warned, by places as lofty as the New York Times, that 2.2 million Americans will die based on a British model. That will be way too high.

We are about to be told that you can only contract the disease if someone is sneezing or coughing. That will be wrong. Delivery boxes, we’ll be told, will need to be sanitized and left alone for hours. That’ll be wrong, too.

We are about to be told by the government’s top medical expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that masks are unnecessary and in fact, ineffective. He will change his tune on this.

And we’re about to be told by the current president, Donald Trump, that the whole thing might one day magically disappear. He will change his tune on this as well.

Even death is political

Be mindful, future selves, of the president in this war. He will turn it into an opportunity to embellish himself. He will say a lot of wild things, including a weird suggestion about disinfectant. He will boast and brag and make preening predictions about victory, suggesting an amazing Easter with the whole thing in the rearview. Eventually, he will slink off the stage, overwhelmed by the power of this enemy.

It will destroy his chances of reelection. Critics will attack. Pundits will cluck their tongues. Fact-checkers will dismantle his every sentence. Most of it will be deserved. He will brazenly defy this, go unmasked whenever there are cameras, and ultimately contract the disease himself. By that point, discourse will be so poisonous, that some Americans — including a former staffer to President Barack Obama named Zara Rahim — will post “I hope he dies.”

But Trump will do one thing that will alter the course of history. He will create a program called Operation Warp Speed. Pay attention to that. It’s not a silly-sounding nothing burger. It will earmark hundreds of billions of dollars for vaccine development, and knock down the rigid bureaucratic Food and Drug Administration barriers that usually hold up such development.

It will prove to be a game changer, our biggest single weapon of defense. But it will take a while to yield results. And while those lab-coated miracle workers labor tirelessly out of the limelight, the rest of the world will catch fire.

Fighting the virus, and each other

Our March 2020 selves are about to go to war not only with spiky surface proteins that attach to our healthy cells, but with each other.

Yes, many of us will embody all that is great about America — risking our safety for neighbors in need. Our health care workers, our police and firefighters, our bus drivers, even our grocery store clerks will be hailed as heroic.

But many of us will ignore selflessness or grace. Instead, we will act on fear. We will fight each other for the last roll of toilet paper. We will shoot at people who ask us to wear masks. We will push a park ranger into a lake when he asks a crowd to disperse. We will harass Chinese Americans as if they were responsible for importing this plague.

With our jobs either put on hold, shuttered or lost altogether to virus lockdowns, we will turn inward. And that will fuel a season of ugly self-righteousness. Some will denigrate those who have COVID-19 doubts as dangerous fools who should be muted. Others will mock those who follow every guideline as puppets, weak and gullible.

It will soon turn political, and the wearing of a mask, like the blue and gray of the Civil War, will symbolize which side you are on. Protests will get ugly. Militias will energize. Places like Twitter and Facebook will suddenly become arbiters of what it proper and what is dangerous.

Our media will behave not dispassionately, as is its purpose, but the opposite, waving the flag of one side or the other, shaming its critics, jumping on the latest turns and trumpeting them out of proportion. It will not help that 2020 is an election year — in fact, that may be the worst coincidence of the entire pandemic — and political reporting and COVID-19 reporting will become all but indistinguishable.

Governors will catapult in power, as states handle battles differently, and that power will be used to save people but kill jobs, or save jobs but kill people, or both. Hypocrites will abound. The governor of California will keep his state in a terse lockdown, yet dine maskless at a trendy restaurant. The mayor of Austin, Texas, will tell his constituents to “stay at home … this is not the time to relax “ — while vacationing in Mexico!

Elected officials will sometimes morph into authoritarians, and we will hear more calls for lawsuits, resignations and impeachments than any year in memory.

Meanwhile, our stoked anger will take to the streets, and social issues will prompt marching and demonstrating, which will sometimes lead to looting and burning. We might never see such combustion were it not for the fear and isolation that COVID-19 will bring. But it will happen. And the country will be scarred forever.

Human interaction changed … forever?

Beware, also, our March 2020 selves, the human cost of this pandemic. The handshake will be retired. Hugging will be verboten. Going to peck someone’s cheek will bring a backpedal of repulsion.

Human touch will disappear, and we will learn just how crucial it is to our existence. Our loved ones will sometimes die alone in hospitals, a lonely nurse holding a cellphone as weeping families gush their goodbyes.

We will be locked away from all that soothes, interlocked fingers, gentle caresses, eye contact, the whispered “I love you.” This will be the cruelest thievery of all.

But we will counter it. We will rediscover the family dinner table. We will enjoy avoiding a daily commute. We will watch sports less and forget about movie grosses and gossip. We will dress like we’re still in bed, morning, noon and night. We will play with our children more.

But our children will also be casualties. In a move we will come to regret, schools will be shut down in an overabundance of caution — and often in defiance of data which shows kids barely catch or transmit the virus. Critics will shout, “Let the kids go back!” Parents will insist on it. But teachers will bristle, their unions holding firm. Everyone will say “Follow the science!”

It won’t matter. Science, we will discover, is a bendable thing, twisted and pretzeled to support almost any argument. All will depend on whom you believe. Some doctors will be worshipped. Some will be demonized.  A study will be held up. Another study will counter it. “Follow the science” will become the most misused phrase in the country.

A nation divided

The price of all this will be no less than the fabric of our society: the connected community. We will divide. We will be locked away. No big family gatherings. No holiday parties. Eventually, even the unthinkable will be decreed: the government telling us how many people we can have for Thanksgiving. By that point, we’ll be so deadened by the previous blows, it won’t even seem radical.

We will be tested and retested. Every American will have story about a swab being stuck up a nose. Meanwhile, milestones will go unmarked. Birthdays and anniversaries uncelebrated. Thread by thread, everything we call normal life will be undone, until some of us will have had enough. Some states will reverse course. Some cities will look the other way. Some sheriffs and police forces will refuse to enforce rules they find unreasonable.

A Michigan barber will become a folk hero. A New York restaurateur will be hailed for his defiance. Gym owners will be revered as patriots.

And all of this will happen as we wait and wait, week after week, month after month, in that unflappable American resilience that believes — that all but insists — that things will get better.

What would you have changed?

And they will get better. Eventually. “Warp speed” will prove to be more than a kitschy label. Nine months after the WHO uses the word “pandemic,” a needle will go into an arm, and like Yorktown, like Gettysburg, like Normandy, that event will shift the war.

We are not out of the woods. Danger still lurks, but in America, anyhow, the vaccines are bringing a new sunrise. Which begs the question: if we knew this back then, if we knew the coronavirus war would be, essentially, one year of acute suffering followed by gradual relief, would we have behaved differently?

Would we have freaked out less about supplies? Would we have been more tolerant of second opinions? Would we have paced ourselves in our despair, and panicked less when some new study predicted the worst?

Would our politicians have been less hypocritical? Would the election have turned out differently? Would the fights we lost our friends and family over never have taken place?

We’ll never know. We can only stand here now, on the one-year anniversary, looking over our shoulders and perhaps wondering why we did the things we did. We made mistakes. We lost lives because of them. We got too tense, too angry, too self-righteous.

But we learned things as well. As the full C.S. Lewis quote goes, “You can’t go back and change the beginning … but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

With the corner turned, we have a chance to be kinder, less fearful, more gracious. It’s been a year. But as death recedes, and the vaccines shield our most vulnerable, a familiar world can be spotted in the fog, drifting back this way. Note to our 2020 and 2021 selves. Appreciate that world when it returns. That’s how we begin to heal.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Download “The Sports Reporters” podcast each Monday and Thursday on-demand through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and more. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.

“For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

I quoted that speech once to Morrie Schwartz, my beloved college professor and the namesake of the book “Tuesdays With Morrie.” He, like Gehrig, was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, which is what everyone called it before it became Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

By that point Morrie couldn’t walk, dress, wash or turn his head. He lay in his long chair, covered by a blanket, trapped in his withering body.

“Do you remember that speech?” I asked him, mimicking it. “Today … I consider myself … the luckiest man … on the face of the earth?”

Morrie closed his eyes and nodded. “Yeah. Well. I didn’t say that.”

Most people don’t. Most people with ALS get scared. They worry. They suffer. The disease remains an elusive foe, striking young and old with no apparent reason or discernment. Most who get it don’t live beyond a few years.

Morrie was diagnosed in his mid 70s. He was shocked. Depressed. But at some point, he made a profound decision. He was going to fight back, to teach — because he was a teacher — to his dying day, on what we learn about life once we know we’re going to die.

He rose to that challenge. He became a marvel, an inspiration.

ALS has that effect on its inflicted sometimes. It invigorates, even as it enervates. It lights you up, even as it shuts you down.

‘I’m going to make a difference’

In April 2017, a songwriter named Bryan Wayne Galentine was also diagnosed with ALS. He was only 49.

“Growing up, Bryan’s dream was to play baseball,” his wife, Staci, recalls. “He played in college, but then he got injured. Still, he always dreamed of being part of the major leagues.”

Realizing he was now stricken by — and likely to die of — a disease named after a baseball player, Bryan got the idea of a single day where all the major league teams would honor Lou Gehrig and call attention to ALS. After all, they had special dates, honoring Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente. Maybe they could add one for Gehrig?

So Bryan texted friends he’d made in the ALS community — other patients, their families — and they organized a group called LG4Day to begin the arduous process of lobbying Major League Baseball.

It wasn’t easy. The league doesn’t just create such days. The LG4Day folks were told the best approach was to contact individual teams and get them on board. Letters were written. Emails. Requests for presentations.

“It was morning until night for Bryan,” Staci recalls. “They had meetings, and then with COVID they turned to virtual meetings. But he looked at it as his job. This is what he said: I’m going to finish this.”

Bryan had become one of those invigorated ALS patients; the more he lost of his body, the sharper his mind focused. In that way, he was like Augie Nieto, who founded Life Fitness, and then, following an ALS diagnosis in his 40s, dedicated his efforts to create Augie’s Quest, which has raised millions for ALS research. Or Pete Frates and Pat Quinn, both ALS victims, who started the Ice Bucket Challenge that raised $100 million to fight the disease.

“(Bryan) always said, ‘We all have a terminal disease. It’s called life,'” Staci recalls. “It’s what you’re going to do with that life that matters. From Day 1, he decided, I’m going to make a difference.”

No need to wait

ALS is a slow burning candle. It melts you gradually — robbing your balance, your extremities, eventually your voice. Bryan knew his vocal cords were on the clock. As a long-time songwriter for other people (he’d written country hits for Tommy Shane Steiner and Big and Rich), he decided to record an album singing his own songs before his voice was gone, in part so his wife and two sons would always be able to hear him.

The name of that album became “While You Wait.” The lyrics of the title song include these lines:

“You can stand there at the station

With your ticket for the train

While the seconds turn and the years then fade away

You can change the world

or leave it just the same

While you wait. 

Galentine chose not to wait. And because of that, his persistence — and the persistence of the LG4Day group — paid off.

Last week, Major League Baseball announced that starting this year, June 2 would officially become Lou Gehrig Day in every major league ballpark. Players will wear patches with Gehrig’s No. 4, while money and awareness are raised across the country.

“We look forward to honoring all the individuals and families, in baseball and beyond, who have been affected by ALS,” commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement, “and hope Lou Gehrig Day advances efforts to end this disease.”

It was a happy day. And a sad one. Because Galentine was no longer here to witness it.

He died last October.

A true iron man

I asked Staci what her husband would have done were he alive to hear the news.

“Oh, my gosh, first of all, tears would just be streaming,” she says. “I mean, happy, happy tears. But then, you know, he would say that this is just the start. … What do we need to do to end ALS? Because we’re losing friends every single day.”

June 2 was chosen because that was the date, in 1925, that Gehrig started in place of Wally Pipp and began his iron man streak of 14 straight years without missing a game.

This June 2, Staci and her two sons hope to be at the Baltimore Orioles game, their favorite team. “We already checked the schedule,” she admits. “It’s a home game.”

They’ll be missing their own iron man that day, of course. But they’ll be thinking of him, maybe shed a tear for him, and for the others who have passed, and the 5,000 new people in the U.S. who are diagnosed with ALS every year.

Galentine, like so many with this awful diagnosis, was a warrior. He once wrote, in an essay about fighting ALS, “I guess I only found my voice once I started to lose it.”

His voice will go on now, every June 2, when they yell “Play ball!” And when they sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” don’t be surprised if you hear his echo.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Download “The Sports Reporters” podcast each Monday and Thursday on-demand through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and more. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.

For once, America didn’t quiver.

Why is that? Two years ago, the news of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian calling it quits would have been water cooler topic No. 1. He’s one of the biggest stars in music. She’s the most powerful force in the history of reality TV. Together, they have hundreds of millions of social media followers. And their every move, post and photograph has been scrutinized worldwide. Remember when Kim’s bare butt photo nearly broke the internet?

Yet these days, we don’t gather around water coolers. And last week’s announcement of KimYe’s split was quickly glossed over for news about Ted Cruz’s jaunt to Cancun or Andrew Cuomo’s hot water situation in New York. Heck, even the Mars landing got bigger billing.

The celebrity business has gone cold in this country. It’s taken a massive hit from COVID-19. And no one should feel sorry about that. On the contrary. You could argue it’s one of the few good things to emerge from The Year of Coronavirus.

Think about it. When was the last time you heard or cared about a movie star dating another movie star, or marrying one, or cheating on one? When was the last time some crazy promotional stunt had the whole country talking about a rapper or an actor?

Gossip feels as stupid as it is. And the lack of new movie buzz, celebrity appearances, concert tours or Coachella-like festivals have robbed spotlight grabbers of their relevance — and therefore of their dominance. People like Dr. Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old, white-haired, infectious disease specialist, have taken their place.

Talk about tables turning.

Do they feel your pain?

When COVID-19 sent Americans scrambling into their homes a year ago, some thought the celebrity world would boom. After all, with everyone locked in, nothing to do but watch TV or be online, wasn’t that a perfect scenario for the entertainment class to hog the stage? Didn’t movie stars grow larger-than-life during World War II?

That was then. In this war, the entertainers were locked down as well. Who really wanted to watch a late-night host like Jimmy Fallon fawn over an actor through a Zoom screen? It was dull and often cringeworthy. It didn’t seem to matter because it didn’t.

On top of that, celebrities made a string of tone-deaf moves in the early months of COVID-19. Remember Madonna in her luxurious bathtub telling the world the virus was wonderful in that it “made us all equal.” Or Gwyneth Paltrow hawking expensive skirts and sex toys while millions lost their jobs? Ellen DeGeneres compared quarantining in her multimillion dollar home to “jail.” Arnold Schwarzenegger posted warnings from his hot tub.

Perhaps the biggest clunker of all was when Gal Gadot, of “Wonder Woman” fame, organized a celebrity digital sing-along of John Lennon’s “Imagine” to ease everyone’s pain. It was worse than it sounds. And it doesn’t sound good.

These efforts, while liked by some steadfast fans, were overwhelmingly disdained by a public that was in no mood for rich, pampered stars to tell us how we’re all in this together. When media mogul David Geffen posted a beauty shot of his $600 million yacht and wrote “Isolated in the Grenadines, avoiding the virus. I’m hoping everybody is staying safe” well, you could hear the sound of people’s hands slapping their foreheads from here to the Indian Ocean.

Virus is the new star

The cumulative effect was a divorce from our entertainment obsession. And you know what? We did just fine without stars on couches hawking their films, or breathless headlines about weekend box office figures. Nobody missed the bad boy behavior of rock bands on the road. We actually didn’t need Instagram posts from parties that “influencers” were paid to attend.

When everyone is tucked in fear, trying to avoid an enemy outside the door, fame for fame’s sake seems awfully trivial. The message of “we’re all in this together” doesn’t work as an audience builder. All it does is remind people “Hey, that guy’s no better than me.” Or “that woman doesn’t deserve special medical treatment.”

If anything, the virus has leveled the reverence between regular folks and the celebrity class. It’s one thing to pay to see a good-looking person on a silver screen. It’s another to let that person get ahead of you for a vaccine.

You could argue America is better off for having sidelined its obsession with the rich and famous. Not that it’s gone completely. The recent brushups over “The Bachelor” or a Britney Spears documentary prove that.

And once COVID-19 is controlled, and movies, concerts, sporting events and all their attendant glitter returns, it’s likely gushing fans will race back as well.

But for now, why should anyone care about Harry and Meghan? Or who’ll get how much when Kim and Kanye sign their papers?

The old expression goes “if a tree falls in the woods but no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?” The same holds for celebrity during a pandemic. If the audience is preoccupied with saving their house, their job, their lives, who’s hooking up or splitting up doesn’t make — or deserve — a peep.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Download “The Sports Reporters” podcast each Monday and Thursday on-demand through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and more. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.