MOBILE, Alabama -- Last Friday morning, DeAndra Chapman leaned in close and whispered to her 3-year-old daughter, Starla, that Crimson Tide quarterback AJ McCarron was wearing a bright yellow bracelet that she'd given him when he visited her hospital room on Christmas Eve.

He was still wearing it Monday night when he helped lead the University of Alabama to victory in the BCS National Championship game.

Starla was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in September, and has been treated at the University of South Alabama Children’s & Women’s Hospital ever since.

Last week, after enduring three rounds of powerful chemotherapy treatments, Starla went into cardiac arrest. Now, a machine helps the little girl breathe.

“She responds to us through tears,” her mother said. “Medically, there is nothing else they can do.”

But on Christmas Eve, Chapman said, her daughter was awake and excited to meet the star football player from Mobile. She sported a Crimson Tide cheerleader outfit and a huge grin.

“Starla asked him to be part of her team,” Chapman said. “He said he would wear it to the big game.”

“He wanted to do something to give back,” said Dee Dee Bonner, McCarron’s mother, who joined her two sons and their father, Tony McCarron, on the visit to the children’s hospital that day. “When we met Miss Starla and her family they were all wearing Alabama gear and she just melted our hearts. Such a sweet baby.”

Once upon a time, both A.J. and his younger brother, Corey, were both patients at the hospital, she said. A.J. was taken there after crushing the left side of his face in a Wave Runner accident when he was 5,while Corey underwent treatment for an illness as an infant.

“He hasn’t taken it off,” Bonner said of the yellow bracelet.

And, she said, he fulfilled a promise to Starla by pointing to the bracelet Monday during the LSU game when he knew that the cameras were on him.

Since Christmas Eve, Bonner has stopped by to see Starla and her family at least twice, and they’ve posted information about the girl on McCarron’s Facebook page.

“We’ve got a lot of people praying for her,” Bonner said, noting that they wanted others to be aware of what Starla was going through. “God works miracles. AJ is a walking miracle so we know it can happen.”

Starla also has a Facebook fan page with more than 3,000 people following the updates that her mother provides daily about her progress.

Many of the entries end with “#just trust.”

The night before Starla’s first chemotherapy treatment, she told her father, Korey, “Just trust.”

She repeated the sentiment to DeAndra: “Mama, you just trust.”

Tuesday afternoon, as the Chapmans sat close on a small couch, they asked that friends and family “continue lifting us up before God as we wait for a miracle.”