"My parents met at Michigan as freshmen," Michael Hirsch says. "My dad actually rigged a Secret Santa to get my mom because he thought she was cute. And the rest was history." Hirsch was born on Jan. 15, 1992. He grew up on the outskirts of Chicago near Northwestern University. But his parents made sure that he and his sisters remained loyal to the family team. "It was like we were all brainwashed as little kids, almost," Hirsch says. "I mean, we were all decked out in Michigan gear all the time." The walls in Hirsch’s bedroom were covered with posters of Michigan football players. "That was probably my first ambitious dream, if you will — my first goal in my life that I can remember was I wanted to play for Michigan," he says. "I always dreamed about what it would be like to look up and see 100,000 people around you and to sing the fight song and everything." Michael Hirsch was a talented high school football player. As a 220-pound running back, he rushed for 3,375 yards and scored 50 touchdowns. But that wasn't enough to impress the Michigan Wolverines. "I always wished that Michigan would recruit me," Hirsch says. "But I kinda knew — I had a sense, 'You know what, I'm doing OK, but I'm not at that level — that elite level.' An analogy that I'll make, I guess, is if, I don't know, you thought someone in your high school was the cutest girl in your high school, and, sure, you wanted to date her. But it's not like if you didn't have the chance you felt terrible, because a thousand other people couldn't date her, too." If he couldn't date the cutest girl, Hirsch figured he'd go for the nerdiest. He decided he'd use football to try to get into a good college. "And I found this dream school with a great football program in Harvard," he says. "And so I committed there." 'I Just Couldn't Shake It' So in the fall of 2010, Hirsch moved into his freshman dorm. (Full disclosure: Hirsch and I went to Harvard at the same time, but we didn't know each other because he was way cooler than me.) Hirsch played on the JV team as a freshman. He had added 10 pounds since his high school days, so he started running less and blocking more. In March, spring practice began. "And I just felt like I had a cold that I couldn't shake," he says. "And you're working really hard because you have those 6 a.m. workouts every day. I thought maybe I was run down, so I just tried to rest. And you know what, I couldn't shake it. I thought maybe I have some allergies or something." But he didn't worry about it too much. He finished out the year and went home for the summer. "My mom's, like, 'Your voice sounds a little different, and you still don't feel good. Let's start to go to some doctors and figure this out,'" Hirsch recalls. "So then I saw, I wanna say, like, 15 doctors. They kept putting me on different antibiotics. I'd try this for a little bit. I'd try that. And my health just kept getting worse. My ears were sore. My knees were sore. My throat hurt all the time. Sometimes there would be blood in my spit, and it was kinda progressing quickly." He saw even more doctors. Finally he found an allergist who called it: Hirsch had Wegener’s granulomatosis. It's a rare autoimmune disease that causes blood vessels to become inflamed. Untreated it can lead to organ failure and, eventually, death.

"I was playing Div. I football, like, a month ago and suddenly I'm sitting in a hospital bed." Michael Hirsch

"I was playing Div. I football, like, a month ago, and suddenly I'm just sitting in a hospital bed," he recalls. "And I remember all these doctors kept coming in and out, and I'm hooked up to different things. It was, like, 'Oh, wow. This is actually something that's pretty serious.'" The doctors put Hirsch on a plan: every week he'd inject himself in the leg with a drug to reduce inflammation. He would also need to visit a doctor regularly for blood tests and other treatments. Luckily, he connected with a top rheumatologist at a hospital just three subway stops from Harvard's campus. So Hirsch could go back for his sophomore year while he underwent treatment. But football? "I mentioned it to a doctor, and he said, 'Oh, no. You're not gonna be able to play any sport, not to mention a contact sport.' That was absolutely a tough moment for me, just because all my best friends were on the team," Hirsch says. "I was so excited to go back and compete and be with them, and suddenly that was taken away. And there was certainly a little bit of an empty feeling there — a 'What next? What am I going to do?'" From Prospect...To Team Manager During the fall of his sophomore year, Hirsch held out hope that he’d someday be able to rejoin the team. But as his recovery dragged on – he needed blood infusions and then he got tubes put in his ears and then he underwent trachea surgery – he came to accept that he was never going to be able to suit up for the varsity. He could've found something else to do – like play video games all the time or actually do all the reading for class or, you know, hang out with me on the school newspaper. But he decided that he'd made a four-year commitment to the team. So if he couldn't play, he'd be a manager. So the guy who'd scored 50 touchdowns in high school spent his sophomore, junior and senior years carrying water, setting up cones and filming practices. "It certainly was a sense of loss," Hirsch says. "I continued to dream about playing football all the time after that. I'd wake up and I'd be, like, 'Dang, that's a dream now.'"

"I continued to dream about playing football all the time after that. I'd wake up and I'd be, like, 'Dang, that's a dream now.'" Michael Hirsch