A lot — including a baby’s name — is riding on the CFP title game for Seattle’s Michigan fans

Growing up in Edmonds, Kathy Preston Ehrlich rooted for Seattle’s most popular football team: the University of Washington. The Seahawks didn’t arrive until Ehrlich, now 60, was a teenager. “This was a Husky town,” she said.

Ehrlich thought she’d go to UW back then. Her brothers eventually did. But ultimately, when the time came, she chose to attend the University of Michigan, where her father and several other generations of family members had gone to school.

Her decision has led to more than a couple of house-divided games over the years, as the Huskies and Wolverines have squared off at the Rose Bowl multiple times. But as the teams prepare to play Monday in Houston with a national championship on the line, the stakes — and, in some cases, the ambivalence — have never been higher for the 10,760 Seattle-area Michigan alumni who suddenly find themselves at a distance from their region’s rooting interests.

“They’re my two favorite teams,” Ehrlich said. “It’s my worst nightmare.”

To be clear, Ehrlich will root for the Wolverines. The president of the University of Michigan Club of Seattle will watch the national title game with scores of Michigan fans at the Ship Canal location of Old Stove Brewing Co., where the local chapter of the school’s alumni association holds weekly game watches. (There also will be a contingent of Wolverines at JJ Mahoney’s Irish Pub in Redmond.)

Around 300 Michigan fans packed the North Queen Anne brand of Old Stove Brewing, which was co-founded by Vicksburg, Mich., native Chris Moore, to see Michigan’s Rose Bowl triumph over Alabama on Jan. 1.

But Ehrlich retains a “soft spot” for the Huskies. For perhaps the first time ever, she wouldn’t be devastated if Michigan loses — even if she has “people crawling out of the woodwork, coming at me.” Her Edmonds neighborhood has not exactly taken kindly to the large Michigan flag hanging in her window.

Still, there’s little animus between the fan bases, according to Michael Roberto, a graduate of both schools and Ehrlich’s predecessor as president of the club. He’s been wearing Michigan gear around town all week with almost no pushback; a Dawg fan and fellow QFC shopper, for instance, merely shared Roberto’s excitement for the game. After all, the most recent of the schools’ four Rose Bowls matchups was more than three decades ago.

“I don’t think most people today have a memory of that history,” Roberto said. “I don’t think people here see it as a big rivalry.”

Roberto, who received his bachelor’s from Michigan and a doctorate in analytical chemistry from UW, sees fewer dual Michigan and Washington degree-holders these days, as tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft often hire engineers and workers straight out of undergrad. But the recruitment of these workers over the past couple of decades has grown Michigan’s young alumni base in the region significantly. While the local chapter of the alumni association is the oldest of any club outside the state of Michigan — for decades, it even handed out a trophy to the top high-school football team in Seattle — it only recently became a “tier one” club, joining more traditional Wolverine hubs such as ones in Chicago and New York.

Kyle Tenenbaum is one of those young Michigan alums who uprooted to the area. The Columbia City resident and die-hard Wolverines fan soon adopted UW as his second-favorite team. This season he attended five UW games with his wife, Lauren Violette.

“I’ve been stoked to root on both teams all season,” Tenenbaum said. “And now here we are at the end, and I’m like, ‘Oh, no.’ ”

Violette, meanwhile, saw an opportunity. The doctorate candidate in epidemiology at UW isn’t much of a college football fan, she admits. But she is competitive. So with the couple expecting its first child any day now, Violette decided to put a little more skin in the game: If UW wins, she gets to choose their child’s name. If Michigan wins, Tenenbaum does.

The couple don’t know the gender of the baby yet but have narrowed a list of names to six, from which the winner must choose. “Kyle is not allowed to go rogue and pick Jim Harbaugh or something,” Violette said.

The Michigan coach — who previously coached the Seahawks’ NFC West rival San Francisco 49ers — might not be the most popular name in Seattle. But bidding on a football autographed by the coach will help raise money for a scholarship program, Roberto said, that benefits Washington high-school students attending Michigan.

Ehrlich added another bit of solace for Husky fans that only a grizzled Wolverine could offer.

“We might be the winningest football team in the country,” she said, alluding to the program’s total victories, “but we’re also the losingest bowl-game team in the country.”

And no matter who wins, the loser will have an opportunity to inflict a measure of payback Oct. 5, when the Huskies host the Wolverines at Husky Stadium for the first time as members of the Big Ten. After the date was announced, Ehrlich and others scrambled to organize a “sailgate” for the club that day. She anticipates having to plan more events for matchups between the schools now that they’re conference foes.

“I didn’t know what I was getting into,” said Ehrlich, who’s in her first year as president of the club.

But the Wolverines and Huskies fan knows she’ll just have to get used to it.