On Dec. 6, Notre Dame officials said, Manti Te\u2019o received an alarming phone call: his dead girlfriend, whose loss had inspired him during what had become a triumphant year for the Fighting Irish, might still be alive. Either that or Te\u2019o, a gifted linebacker with a reputation for trusting others, had been the victim of a hoax, and the woman he thought he had come to know online and through long, emotional phone calls had never really existed….<\/p>\n
[The] sequence of events in December was one of many being pored over Thursday \u201d\u201d by journalists and bloggers, students at Notre Dame and an American public trying to figure out the truth at the heart of one of the most bizarre of sports stories.<\/p>\n
Was Te\u2019o a sympathetic victim of a cruel fraud, or a calculating participant in a phony story that had been milked to aid his bid for the Heisman Trophy?<\/p>\n