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Te'o, a Notre Dame official said this week, was badly shaken by the call.

Nonetheless, two days later, on Dec. 8 at the Heisman Trophy ceremony, Te'o was asked about his most unforgettable moment of the season. Te'o, clearly aware of questions surrounding his girlfriend's death, responded with little hesitation: the memory he would never forget from the 2012 season was the moment he learned his girlfriend was dead.

That sequence of events in December was one of many being pored over Thursday — 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.

Was Te'o 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?

The series of events in early December, though, like so much else that has emerged about Te'o and his girlfriend in the last 48 hours, is hardly conclusive. Te'o, in giving the interview on Dec. 8, quite possibly was nothing more than a frightened and confused young man, unsure himself of what was going on or what to say.

On Thursday, a day of little clarity and deepening mystery, Notre Dame stuck by its official version: Te'o was the target of a meanspirited and vicious hoax, and the university's hired investigators had determined that it involved a vast cast of characters, all engaged in an effort to humiliate a humble, private and perhaps somewhat naïve young man in the public spotlight.

Te'o, for his part, did not speak. His agent did not offer a statement, and a rumored interview on national television never occurred. His agent told The Associated Press that he had been in Bradenton, Fla., training at the IMG Academy in preparation for the N.F.L. draft.

One thing in the odd, evolving drama did seem to become clearer: as far back as early December, there were some people in the Twitter world who were beginning to sound alarms about the authenticity of Te'o's inspirational story.

Those people online maintained openly that they believed Te'o had been duped, with some pointing to a California man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo as the architect of the scheme. They even joked about the embarrassment and absurdity of the fake story line as Notre Dame prepared to play in the Bowl Championship Series title game against Alabama.

On Dec. 5, one Twitter message was sent to The New ND Nation, with 7,000 followers, saying it needed "to know the truth" about Te'o's girlfriend.

A blogger, Justin Megahan, collected some of the Twitter messages in one blog post and titled it "Catfished," referring to "Catfish," a 2010 film in which a woman created a fake online persona to strike up a relationship.

The alarms online, such as they were, never seemed to gain wider attention. Perhaps because, at the time, a hoax seemed an unlikely possibility.

Even a month and a half later — and after the Web site Deadspin first reported on the hoax on Wednesday — figuring out the exact truth continued to be challenging.

As of Thursday evening, the people identified by Deadspin to be behind the hoax, including Tuiasosopo, had not emerged to tell their side of the story. Telephone calls to Tuiasosopo were not successful. Some people who appeared close to him shunned journalists on their Twitter accounts.

As President Obama tries to persuade a reluctant Congress to pass new gun laws, the poll found that a majority of Americans — 54 percent — think gun control laws should be tightened, up markedly from a CBS News poll last April that found that only 39 percent backed stricter laws.

The rise in support for stricter gun laws stretched across political lines, including an 18-point increase among Republicans. A majority of independents now back stricter gun laws.

Whether the Newtown shooting — in which 20 first graders and 6 adults were killed — will have a long-term effect on public opinion of gun laws is hard to assess just a month after the rampage. But unlike the smaller increases in support for gun control immediately after other mass shootings, including after the 2011 shooting in Tucson that severely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the latest polling results suggest a deeper, and possibly more resonating, shift.

In terms of specific gun proposals being considered, the poll found even wider support, including among gun owners.

The idea of requiring background checks on all gun purchases, which would eliminate a provision that allows about 40 percent of guns to be sold by unlicensed sellers without checks, was overwhelmingly popular. Nine in 10 Americans would favor such a law, the poll found — including 9 in 10 of the respondents who said that there was a gun in their household, and 85 percent whose households include members of the National Rifle Association.

A ban on high-capacity magazines, like the 15-round and 30-round magazines that have been used in several recent mass shootings, was supported by more than 6 in 10, and by a majority of those who live in households with guns. And just over half of all respondents, 53 percent, said they would support a ban on some semiautomatic weapons.

After the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Tucson in 2011, polls found that 47 percent of Americans favored stricter gun laws.

"I'm from a rural area in the South, I grew up in a gun culture, my father hunted," Leslie Hodges, a 64-year-old graphic artist who lives in Atlanta and has a gun, said in a follow-up interview. "However, I don't believe being able to have a gun keeps you from thinking reasonably about changes that would keep someone from walking into a school and being able to kill 20 children in 20 seconds. I think that we can say, O.K., we want the freedom to have guns in this country, but there are rules we can all agree to that will make us all safer."

The poll also gave an indication of the state of play in Washington at the outset of what is expected to be a fierce debate over the nation's gun laws, as the National Rifle Association and several members of Congress, particularly Republicans in the House, have criticized the gun control measures that Mr. Obama proposed Wednesday and have vowed to block them.

Americans said that they trusted the president over Republicans in Congress to make the right decisions about gun laws by a margin of 47 percent to 39 percent, the poll found.

The National Rifle Association, the powerful gun lobby, is viewed favorably by nearly 4 in 10 Americans, the poll found. All told, 38 percent said that they had a favorable opinion of the group, while 29 percent had a negative view and the rest had no opinion. The N.R.A. was viewed positively by 54 percent of those with guns in their homes.

But the group is deeply unpopular with people in households without guns, who were twice as likely to have a negative view of the N.R.A. as a positive one: 41 percent of them expressed a negative view of it, while only 20 percent expressed a positive one.

The survey underscored how common guns in America are: 47 percent of those surveyed said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, and 31 percent had close friends or relatives who did. The top reasons cited for owning guns were protection and hunting.

The national telephone poll was conducted by land lines and cellphones from Jan. 11 to Jan. 15, before the president announced his proposals to curb gun violence. It surveyed 1,110 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Some gun owners, like Sally Brady, a 69-year-old retired teacher who lives in Amissville, Va., explained in follow-up interviews why they would support some restrictions on ammunition or more thorough background checks of all gun buyers.

"I see no reason for high-capacity magazines if you want to go hunting," said Mrs. Brady, an independent who owns a hunting rifle. "The purpose of hunting is sport, and you don't need a whole big bunch of bullets to shoot a deer or a squirrel. If you're that poor of a shot, stay out of the woods."

Despite the higher support for stricter gun laws, many Americans do not think the changes would be very effective at deterring violence. While most Americans, 53 percent, said stricter gun laws would help prevent gun violence, about a quarter said they would help a lot.

Other steps were seen as being potentially more effective. About three-quarters of those surveyed said that having more police officers or armed security guards would help prevent mass shootings in public places. And more than 8 in 10 said better mental health screening and treatment would help prevent gun violence.

Violence in popular culture is seen by a large majority of Americans, 75 percent, as contributing to gun violence in the United States, including about 4 in 10 who say it contributes a lot.  

In every episode of the show, a docudrama, the hosts try to unite couples who have interacted online or via telephone but have never met in person. Participants find out whether the objects of their affection are telling the truth about who they really are.

In one episode, a man suspects that a pageant contestant who messaged him on Facebook may not be real. She turns out to be a friend who used pictures online to create the persona.

In another episode, a woman wants to find out the truth about Mike, a man with whom she developed an online relationship. But it is revealed that Mike is actually the creation of a woman who wanted to divert attention from an ex-boyfriend. Some lies on the show are bigger than others, but typically the reveal at the end results in surprise or, often, embarrassment at having been duped.

A so-called catfish is the engineer of the false online identity, a reference to the bottom-feeding, whiskered water dwellers. Getting catfished is when someone falls for a person online who is not necessarily real. It can involve pictures, phone calls, social media profiles, text messages, e-mails and even phony friends or family members.

Many were introduced to this strange universe of digital dupers for the first time Wednesday when Deadspin reported that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o's girlfriend, whose death provided an inspirational story line for the Fighting Irish's triumphant season, did not exist. While the details of what Te'o knew and when are still emerging, the term "catfished" exploded online with Twitter hash tags created and Google searches soaring.

Notre Dame has said that Te'o was the victim of a hoax, with Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick even mentioning the show "Catfish" during a news conference Wednesday. In a statement, Te'o called the situation "painful and humiliating." It is unclear whether Te'o had a role in the hoax or lied about aspects of the relationship.

The term "catfishing" became popular with the release of the 2010 documentary film "Catfish," which follows a man's relationship with a woman on Facebook and his quest to find out whether she is real. The TV show of the same name followed on MTV.

For those who have immersed themselves in that world, the Te'o story was not surprising.

Andrew Jarecki, a producer of the film and an executive producer of the television show, said Te'o's experience sounded typical.

"We've been living this experience for years," Jarecki said.

He said part of what inspired the idea for the television show was the number of inquiries those involved with the film received about being potential victims and even perpetrators after the documentary's release.

"It's a new category of charades," Jarecki said. "It was only a matter of time before it happened to someone famous."

He said that while many of the tools used in catfish schemes — Facebook, Twitter and cellphones — were modern, the genesis of the trend was age-old: loneliness. Even though most computers are equipped with tools to video chat, he pointed out, many of those who become duped by online personalities stick to the phone and pictures. Te'o has said that he spoke at length with a woman he thought was named Lennay Kekua on the phone and received text messages from her brother.

"It's about finding someone who feels real to you," Jarecki said. "In the Internet, the person is satisfying that need. That's why he says he's embarrassed. You have people who are drawn into a situation."

For the most part, catfishing is not against the law, said Bradley Shear, a Washington-based lawyer who has examined legal issues related to social media. Some states have laws that criminalize impersonating someone, but not necessarily creating a fictitious person.

Real people in a picture that was used by a catfish to create a fake identity could have a claim because their likeness was used without permission, Shear said. Legal details may vary by state, and most laws are focused on identity theft, in which someone steals an identity in order to financially gain rather than for matters of cyberheartbreak.

Should Te'o pursue damages and claim that he lost an endorsement opportunity or that his N.F.L. draft position suffered as a result of the girlfriend hoax, he could face an uphill battle in court, Shear said.

"It's very difficult to win," he said. "You have to prove that direct, causal connection."

Deception online is far from something new. Some 81 percent of people misrepresented their weight, height or age in their online dating profiles, according to research from Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"People lie frequently online, but the amount by which they lied was small," Toma said. "Technologically, it's effortless to lie. Theoretically, deception is easy."

Becoming a catfish or falling prey to one is understandable and perhaps more common in an era of heavy texting, e-mailing and online chatting, she said.

Andrea Baker, a sociologist at Ohio University who has studied online relationships and communities, said: "I totally understand how these emotions develop. These are people who are lonesome who turn out to be romantics rather than realists. They buy into some deep bond."

Even highly intelligent people may find themselves susceptible to such a hoax, Baker said, part of the public's fascination with the catfish phenomenon and the Te'o story.

"I think people really identify with this thought — 'There's someone out there for me; it's just a matter of finding that person,' " Baker said. "It's a fantasy for a lot of people that the online person could be it, but knowing underneath it could be too good to be true. And there's the idea that we're trying to learn something from these experiences because we could also be caught up in it ourselves."

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth of United States District Court, imposed the fines on Wednesday, saying the Russian government had done nothing to comply with a judgment that he issued in 2010 ordering it to return the texts, more than 12,000 books and 50,000 religious papers known as the Schneerson Collection.

It was not immediately clear what form the Kremlin's threatened retaliation would take. In an earlier reaction to the dispute over the collection, which has now lasted decades, it forbade its state-run museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, to lend works to American museums. That highly unusual ban, instituted in February 2011, has left gaps in some major exhibitions.

The Kremlin said it feared that those works would be seized and held as ransom in the dispute, even though American officials have insisted that such seizures are prohibited by law.

The levying of the fines, potentially totaling more than $18 million a year but unlikely to be paid, added tension to Russian-American relations, which have become strained over the past year. Most recently, the countries have been at bitter odds over a Russian law banning adoptions of Russian children by American families, which itself was retaliation for an American law punishing Russians accused of violating human rights.

"The Russian Foreign Ministry regards as absolutely unlawful and provocative the decision of the federal court in Washington," the government said in a statement on Thursday. "We have repeatedly stated that this verdict is extraterritorial in character, contradicts international law and is legally void."

The government called the Schneerson Collection, which is held partly in the Russian State Library and partly in the Russian Military Archives, a "national treasure of the Russian people." It added, "U.S. officials are hopefully aware that if Russian state property, not protected by diplomatic immunity, is seized in the United States, as Chabad is demanding as an injunctive measure, we will have to take a tough response."

At a hearing this month, the Obama administration urged Judge Lamberth not to impose the fines, saying that they would further sour relations with Russia and imperil diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute. But in his decision, Judge Lamberth rejected those arguments and said he saw no reason to expect diplomacy to succeed.

In 1991, a court in Moscow ordered that the collection be turned over to the Chabad organization, but the Soviet Union soon collapsed, and the judgment was set aside by the Russian authorities. The Chabad group filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2004, but in 2009, after Russia failed in an effort to have the case thrown out, the Kremlin withdrew its lawyers and declared that the court had no authority to adjudicate the matter.

"Defendants have steadily resisted all legal and diplomatic efforts to compel them to return the collection for at least two decades," Judge Lamberth wrote in his ruling. He added, "The United States' claim that sanctions would 'risk damage to significant foreign policy interests' is similarly unconvincing."

In other respects, damage from the dispute, at least from a cultural perspective, has already been severe. The world's most prestigious museums rely heavily on international loans to put together large and lucrative shows, and such lending was common between the United States and Russia until Russia imposed its moratorium.

Although Chabad now has a large presence in Russia, particularly in Moscow, where it helped build a huge Jewish history museum that opened late last year, Lubavitch officials here said they had no official role in the dispute.

The police declined to say why the child, a second grader, was carrying a .22-caliber handgun or how it had been discovered. It was not fired at the school, Wave Preparatory Elementary School in Far Rockaway, they said.

Students there described a nervous few hours that began when the principal went on the intercom to say that the school was being locked down and that they were to remain in their classrooms.

"I thought we were going to get killed," said Javier Ferrufino, an 11-year-old in fifth grade. "We went to the back of the classroom. I hid with my friend behind some computers."

Officials at the school declined to comment.

The city's Education Department released a statement confirming that a gun had been found in the backpack of a second-grader and that the school had been locked down, but it did not provide further details.

When parents arrived in the afternoon to pick up their children, more than a dozen police officers were still at the school.

A notice given to parents said: "Due to an incident today there was need to secure all students in their classrooms. This procedure is called a lockdown. Our school-based support team is prepared to assist you with any emotional needs as a result of today's lockdown."

Giovanni Dennis, an 8-year-old third grader, said he hid under his teacher's desk after the principal announced the lockdown.

His mother, Cecelia Dennis, said she was upset that she did not know about the lockdown until she arrived to get Giovanni.

"I think they did a good job of locking down the school," she said. "But they could have notified the parents earlier. I am very upset."

Dear Ed: It's O.K. with me. But tell her to put on an apron when she's frying bacon.

Pauline Phillips, a California housewife who nearly 60 years ago, seeking something more meaningful than mah-jongg, transformed herself into the syndicated columnist Dear Abby — and in so doing became a trusted, tart-tongued adviser to tens of millions — died on Wednesday in Minneapolis. She was 94.

Her syndicate, Universal Uclick, announced her death on its Web site. A longtime resident of Beverly Hills, Calif., Mrs. Phillips, who had been ill with Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade, had lived in Minneapolis in recent years to be near family.

If Damon Runyon and Groucho Marx had gone jointly into the advice business, their column would have read much like Dear Abby's. With her comic and flinty yet fundamentally sympathetic voice, Mrs. Phillips helped wrestle the advice column from its weepy Victorian past into a hard-nosed 20th-century present:

Dear Abby: I have always wanted to have my family history traced, but I can't afford to spend a lot of money to do it. Have you any suggestions? — M.J.B. in Oakland, Calif.

Dear M.J.B.: Yes. Run for a public office.

Mrs. Phillips began her life as Abigail Van Buren in 1956 and quickly became known for her astringent, often genteelly risqué, replies to queries that included the marital, the medical and sometimes both at once:

Dear Abby: Are birth control pills deductible? — Bertie

Dear Bertie: Only if they don't work.

She was also known for her long, much-publicized professional rivalry with her identical twin sister, the advice columnist Ann Landers.

Long before the Internet — and long before the pervasive electronic confessionals of Drs. Ruth, Phil, Laura, et al. — the Dear Abby column was a forum for the public discussion of private problems, read by tens of millions of people in hundreds of newspapers around the world.

It is difficult to overstate the column's influence on American culture at midcentury and afterward: in popular parlance, "Dear Abby" was for decades an affectionate synonym for a trusted, if slightly campy, confidante.

On television, the column has been invoked on shows as diverse as "Three's Company," "Dexter" and "Mr. Ed," where, in a 1964 episode in which Mrs. Phillips plays herself, the title character, pining (in an equine way, of course) for a swinging bachelor pad of his own, writes her a letter.

Over the years, recording artists including the Hearts, John Prine and the Dead Kennedys have released a string of different songs titled "Dear Abby."

Even now, Dear Abby's reach is vast. (Mrs. Phillips's daughter, Jeanne Phillips, took over the column unofficially in 1987 and officially in 2000.) According to its syndicator, Universal Uclick, Dear Abby appears in about 1,400 newspapers worldwide, has a daily readership of more than 110 million — in print and on its interactive Web site, dearabby.com — and receives more than 10,000 letters and e-mails a week.

Politically left of center, Mrs. Phillips was generally conservative when it came to personal deportment. As late as the 1990s she was reluctant to advise unmarried couples to live together. Yet beneath her crackling one-liners lay an imperturbable acceptance of the vagaries of modern life:

Dear Abby: Our son married a girl when he was in the service. They were married in February and she had an 8 1/2-pound baby girl in August. She said the baby was premature. Can an 8 1/2-pound baby be this premature? — Wanting to Know

Dear Wanting: The baby was on time. The wedding was late. Forget it.

Mrs. Phillips was also keen, genteelly, to keep pace with the times. In 1976 she confided to People magazine that she had recently seen an X-rated movie. Her sister, she learned afterward, had wanted to see it, too, but feared being recognized.

"How did you get away with it?" Ann Landers asked Dear Abby.

"Well," Dear Abby replied breezily, "I just put on my dark glasses and my Ann Landers wig and went!"

The youngest of four sisters, Pauline Esther Friedman, familiarly known as Popo, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on July 4, 1918. Her twin, Esther Pauline (known as Eppie), beat her into the world by 17 minutes, just as she would narrowly beat her into the advice business.

Their father, Abraham, was a Jewish immigrant from Vladivostok, Russia, who had made his start in the United States as an itinerant chicken peddler and, in an archetypal American success story, ended up owning a chain of movie theaters.

The twins attended Morningside College in Sioux City, where they both studied journalism and psychology and wrote a joint gossip column for the school paper.

As close as they were, the intense competitiveness that would later spill into the public arena was already apparent. "She wanted to be the first violin in the school orchestra, but I was," Mrs. Phillips told Life magazine in 1958. "She swore she'd marry a millionaire, but I did."

In 1939, Pauline Friedman left college to marry Morton Phillips, an heir to a liquor fortune. She was married in a lavish double ceremony alongside Eppie, who, not to be outdone, was wed on the same day to Jules Lederer, a salesman who later founded the Budget Rent A Car corporation.

As a young bride, Mrs. Phillips lived in Eau Claire, Wis., where her husband was an executive with the National Pressure Cooker Company, which his family had acquired.

"It never occurred to me that I'd have any kind of career," Mrs. Phillips told The Los Angeles Times in 1986. "But after I was married, I thought, 'There has to be something more to life than mah-jongg.' "

She took up civic work training hospital volunteers, an experience that helped lay the foundation for her future calling. "I learned how to listen," Mrs. Phillips told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1989. "Sometimes, when people come to you with a problem, the best thing you can do is listen."

In 1955, Mrs. Phillips's twin, now Eppie Lederer, took over the Ann Landers column for The Chicago Sun-Times. A rank beginner soon swamped by a flood of mail, she began sending batches of letters to her sister — for advice, as it were.

"I provided the sharp answers," Mrs. Phillips told The Ladies' Home Journal in 1981. "I'd say, 'You're writing too long (she still does), and this is the way I'd say it.' " She added, "My stuff was published — and it looked awfully good in print."

So good that when The Sun-Times later forbade Mrs. Lederer to send letters out of the office, Mrs. Phillips, by this time living in the Bay Area, vowed to find a column of her own.

She phoned The San Francisco Chronicle, identifying herself as a local housewife who thought she could do better than the advice columnist the paper already had. "If you're ever in the neighborhood," the features editor said rhetorically, "come in and see me."

Mrs. Phillips took him at his word and the next morning appeared unannounced in the newsroom in a Dior dress. She had prudently left her chauffeured Cadillac around the corner.

If only to get rid of her, the editor handed her a stack of back issues, telling her to compose her own replies to the letters in the advice column. She did so in characteristic style and dropped off her answers at the paper. She arrived home to a ringing telephone. The job was hers — at $20 a week.

Mrs. Phillips chose her pen name herself, taking Abigail after the prophetess in the Book of Samuel ("Then David said to Abigail ... 'Blessed is your advice and blessed are you' ") and Van Buren for its old-family, presidential ring. Her first column appeared on Jan. 9, 1956, less than three months after her sister's debut.

An immediate success, the column was quickly syndicated. But with Mrs. Phillips's growing renown came a growing estrangement from her twin, as Dear Abby and Ann Landers battled each other in syndication. According to many accounts, the sisters did not speak for five years, reconciling only in the mid-1960s.

Mrs. Lederer died in 2002, at 83. Besides her daughter, Jeanne, Mrs. Phillips is survived by her husband of 73 years, Mort Phillips; four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. A son, Edward, died in 2011 at 66.

Her columns have been collected in several book-length anthologies, including "Dear Abby on Marriage" (1962) and "The Best of Dear Abby" (1981). From 1963 to 1975, Mrs. Phillips also had a daily "Dear Abby" program on CBS Radio.

In 1982, in a rare professional misstep, Mrs. Phillips acknowledged that she had recycled old letters for use in contemporary columns. (In the kind of parallel experience that seemed to define their lives together, Mrs. Lederer had acknowledged earlier that year to running recycled letters in Ann Landers's column.)

But until her retirement in 2000, Mrs. Phillips remained a trusted adviser in a world that had evolved from discussions of the dainty art of naked bacon-making to all manner of postmodern angst:

Dear Abby: Two men who claim to be father and adopted son just bought an old mansion across the street and fixed it up. We notice a very suspicious mixture of company coming and going at all hours — blacks, whites, Orientals, women who look like men and men who look like women. ... This has always been considered one of the finest sections of San Francisco, and these weirdos are giving it a bad name. How can we improve the neighborhood? — Nob Hill Residents

Dear Residents: You could move.