MORGANTOWN — No matter what they announce as the official attendance at Saturday’s 108th Backyard Brawl meeting between Pitt and West Virginia at Mountaineer Field — and it will exceed 60,000 — you can add one.

Crystal Fields Gallagher may not have a ticket, but she will be there, spiritually sitting in every seat. Rooting for her son, Rodney, the WVU slot receiver, but rooting for something far bigger.

While it is the players who will decide who wins and who loses, the biggest winners may well be considered kids everywhere who can feel the support and inspiration she provides through Rodney to children who have suffered the loss of a mother, a father, a sister or brother.

Gallagher is not only a pass receiver and ball carrier, but he is a symbol of what children go through when they lose a loved one, as he did at age 7 with his mother’s sudden death.

A thousand-point basketball scorer at Albert Gallatin High School, then known as Tri Valley High School across the border from West Virginia in Pennsylvania, in the late 1980s and 1990s, she went on to play her college basketball for Jim Brinkman at Fairmont State.

She transferred to the Penn State-Fayette campus to study criminology, but her basketball career ended as they did not field a team. It was there that her brother introduced her to a former Frazier High School player, Rodney Gallagher Jr., whom she married in 2001.

They had three children, Alyssa, Kaylea and Rodney III.

On Nov. 13, 2011, she died suddenly.

“With it being unexpected it made it harder for our family, Alyssa, the oldest, told George Von Benko of the Herald-Standard a year and a half ago. “But I was so grateful to know that what she had already taught me, I was able to grow with everything that she taught me and continue to embrace everything I learned from her and instill that into my siblings.”

Rodney was the youngest and it hit him as you would expect with a 7-year-old.

He was determined to help carry on her legacy and make good from bad.

They all bonded as a family, leaning upon each other, not seeing the event of her death as a sorrow so much as an inspiration to carry on her values and beliefs.

Meanwhile, Rodney Gallagher III inherited a great deal of athletic ability from both his parents and became a star in both basketball and football at Laurel Highlands, becoming a key recruiting cog in WVU’s plans for the future.

And, if you were to become a Mountaineer, you had to know about the Backyard Brawl.

“I watched this game on TV when I was young and got to know a little bit about it,” Gallagher said. “I really didn’t understand what it was all about until I got here and played in it. The fans care about it, we care about it, with Coach Rod coming back, you know he cares about it a lot because this was his last game before leaving.”

It was a big moment the first time he played in it with the family there, sister Alyssa and sister Kaylea, a member of the Pitt dance team.

“It was a great moment. We got to have a bunch of pictures. Very cool, something we can look back on for many years to come,” he said.

The coaching change from Neal Brown to Rich Rodriguez came after last season and Gallagher had no hesitation in remaining at WVU. This was going to be his junior year and there was much he felt he could accomplish on the field, but also off it in honoring his mother and helping others who had gone through what he went through.

It was the right time, the right place and the right game to do something about it, which grew out of a connection that was established into a group called Children’s Grief Awareness.

“They reached out to me through Instagram and we went back and forth to see what we could do to make this happen,” Gallagher explained. “We recently did something nice for other kids and my mother, also. We put the patch on my helmet so these guys see that on the back of my helmet to support that.

“To continue to help children who went through what I went through means a lot to me,” he admitted. “There’s an extra enthusiasm inside me to not just play for myself but to play for those kids, too.”

And so he will don the Children’s Grief Awareness patch on his helmet and you can’t help but to believe it has more meaning than any commercial advertising patch they can sell on their uniforms.

“The patch means a lot. I play for every game, but this being the Backyard Brawl, I’ll play for her a little more,” Gallagher said. “When we play them, they don’t like us and we don’t like them. We need to do all we can to come out with a win.”