Put yourself in this scenario.

Your boss calls you into his office early one morning. The drive to work was pleasant enough to have you in a chipper mood despite it being a Monday morning. The sky was clear, the sun was warm and the breeze was cool and crisp, so you decide to put your car windows down. Your coffee was delicious. And at first glance, with the sunlight pouring in the office windows, your co-workers carry your same mood.

You poke your head into your boss’ office with a smile and say, “Good morning.” He only looks at you, then at the chair across from him, then back down at the desk. His face tells the story. You sit down without a word, waiting for whatever bad news awaits you, for whatever is about to ruin your mood.

But he is not mad at you. In fact, he is not angry at all. After some mumbling and broken sentences, he finally conveys what exactly is bothering him. His best friend is ill at a hospital two hours away and is not expected to make it through the day.

You’ve never had a relationship or any sort of meaningful interaction with your boss. You never even knew he had friends. But he is a major presence at work and you respect his accomplishments, so in this moment, you feel for him.

In a voice you imagine to be holding back tears, he explains why he specifically brought you into his office. You are in charge of the office’s top project at the moment, and he was wondering how the job was progressing. He must have mentioned his dying friend simply because he needed to share that information with someone, anyone, to unbottle the grief building inside him. At least, that’s what you presume.

The project is going smoothly, so you tell him so. Then you give your condolences, exchange goodbyes and head back to work. Your good mood is gone, replaced by motivation. The project that your boss expressed a clear interest in now becomes more important. And each time you pass your boss’ office and see him working hard through what must be overwhelming despair, you feel that much more motivated. If he can do it, you can do it. You work with the corporate equivalent of an Olympian’s final stretch adrenaline rush, and the project turns out masterful. Your stock has improved in the eyes of your boss, and his stock has improved in the eyes of his superiors. Given the circumstances, you know you’ve done well.

Three months later, you find out your boss’ best friend did not die. He was never in the hospital. He was never sick. He may not even be a real person.

How do you feel?

Suddenly, you start asking the question you should have asked that morning in his office. Why wouldn’t he travel two hours to see his friend in his final moments? Why was he at work? They are easy questions to ask now, but at the time, you don’t question grief. More so, you didn’t truly know your boss outside of work, yet he was confiding the death of a friend with you. Why, if not for inspiration?

Now, keep yourself in the same scenario, but instead of your boss’s friend dying, it is the friend of a seldom seen co-worker. Or instead of death, your boss’ house is being foreclosed. Or his car has been vandalized. How do you feel now? Did those occurrences affect your work?

This is the Manti Te’o story. In both the case of Te’o and the fictional boss, the answers to the above questions are unclear, but it has something to do with his team and its success. And it certainly has something to do with his leadership position. Te’o wasn’t simply a Notre Dame co-worker. He was the boss. Of the biggest and most desperate fanbase in college football. Re-establishing itself as a national power. During its best season in decades.

And the story wasn’t overcoming injury, rebounding from a bad season or anything sports related like that. It was about death.

That “hoax” pulled off the ultimate formula for inspiration. If even one component changes, the story’s effect lessens. Sports have become so much of a legend that if the narrative isn’t an epic tale, it isn’t worth telling. When the story comes together — Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, post-Katrina New Orleans Saints, etc. — the payoff for fans is tremendous, so in some ways this trend is good. But in many other ways, needing Disney-like inspiration for sports to be validated ruins the game. This is the Information Age. Is a real sport still real if it’s told through false storylines? Is the employee’s work legitimate, regardless of quality, if it is the product of manipulation?

Perhaps we needed to be inspired by nonexistent inspiration to understand the question. We still don’t know the answers.

Jack is a senior in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected] him on Twitter @JCassidy10.