The Glimm was born in the fall of 1991, when two things happened at the same time: My sister was accepted to the University of Michigan, and Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson started their freshman year at Michigan. At the time, I didn’t have a college team to root for, so with my sister heading to Ann Arbor, I decided to adopt the Maize and Blue. It was a good time to become a Michigan fan.

The Fab Five were pretty damn good (to this day, the most fun basketball team I’ve ever watched), and very quickly, I became a college basketball addict. By the time March rolled around, I thought it would be fun get my friends involved in college basketball by running a pool at my middle school. About 15 8th graders at Robert E. Bell Middle School joined the pool (for the same $5 per person it costs today), and the tradition began.

Obviously, I picked Michigan to win the whole thing. They didn’t, but they came close – and since nobody else picked them to make a deep run, I won my own pool in its very first year. I haven’t won since.

Mrs. Glimm didn’t come into the picture until the pool’s fourth year, when I was in 11th grade. I was handing out brackets in my AP Calculus class, and Mrs. Glimm stopped me, saying there was no gambling in school. After I insisted that there was no money involved, she asked if she could join.

As she filled out her bracket, Mrs. Glimm said she didn’t know anything about college basketball. She ended up winning. But since she was under the (false) impression that there was no money involved, the prize money went to the runner-up.

Mrs. Glimm represents all that is good about the NCAA Tournament – anybody can win this thing, and knowledge of basketball doesn’t really matter. We all have a chance.

Full disclosure: Her name isn’t Alma, and even though the tournament is called the Glimm Memorial, she’s not dead. She doesn’t even spell her name with two Ms. Some years later, when I named the pool for her, I took some liberties.

That was in college, when I had competition. Andy Latack and I ran competing NCAA tourney pools. I needed something to distinguish my pool from his, so I went with a name and a good story: Alma Glimm.