SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Facing a media throng just days before competing for a national championship, Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o fielded a question about the death of his girlfriend and his ability to rise above the tragedy.

It was a benign question, one he had heard dozens of times before as Lennay Kekua's passing from leukemia had been woven so tightly into the narrative of his triumphant senior year. And he answered it as he always had.

But at that time Te'o — and university officials — knew there was far more to the story than platitudes about football and family.

A week earlier, on Dec. 26, the Heisman runner-up told Notre Dame officials that his girlfriend did not exist and that he was a victim of an elaborate Internet hoax, the school said Wednesday.

"In many ways, Manti was the perfect mark, because he is a guy who is so willing to believe in others and so ready to help, that as this hoax played out in a way that called upon those tendencies of Manti, it roped him more and more into the trap," Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said. "He was not a person who would have a second thought about offering his assistance and help."

Swarbrick outlined a bizarre story in which Te'o learned his girlfriend never existed more than three months after her supposed death. The player received a phone call Dec. 6, while at an awards show, from what he believed was Kekua's old cellphone number. The woman on the other end — in a voice he recognized as Kekua's — told him that she wasn't dead. She later tried to rekindle the relationship, Swarbrick said.

"Every single thing about this, until that day in the first week of December, was real to Manti," Swarbrick said. "There was no suspicion it wasn't. No belief it might not be. The pain was real. The grief was real. The affection was real. That's the nature of this sad, cruel game."

Swarbrick likened the hoax to the movie "Catfish," in which a person creates a fake persona with someone else's picture and then dupes another person into a romantic relationship.

Te'o notified his coaches of the situation Dec. 26, after discussing it with his parents over the Christmas holiday. Swarbrick said he met with the player twice and found his story to be consistent. Te'o and Kekua never met face-to-face, Swarbrick said.

"Several meetings were set up where Lennay never showed," he said.

Kekua's purported passing came within 48 hours of the real death of Te'o's grandmother, Annette Santiago. That double-loss vaulted Te'o onto the cover of Sports Illustrated and, along with Notre Dame's eventual undefeated regular season, into the Heisman Trophy mix. Te'o finished second in that voting.

Te'o released a statement Wednesday insisting that he had been duped into having a long-term, "emotional relationship" with an Internet impostor. He described the situation as "painful and humiliating."

"To think that I shared ... my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been," the statement read.

Notre Dame hired a private investigator, who produced a final report Jan. 4, and the university shared the findings with the Te'o family. The independent investigation revealed online "chatter" among the alleged perpetrators, Swarbrick said, that demonstrated "the joy they were taking" in fooling Te'o.

The Deadspin story, however, is raising questions about Te'o's involvement in the ruse. The site said Kekua's purported Twitter account was created by a California man with ties to the linebacker and his family. An unnamed source suggested the death was a publicity stunt hatched by Te'o and his West Coast counterpart.

At the very least, Te'o and his family have made the truth difficult to decipher because they all made references to Te'o meeting Kekua during their courtship. In October, for example, Te'o described her to ESPN as the most beautiful person he had ever met and his father told the South Bend Tribune in October that Kekua had traveled to Hawaii "every once in a while."