GYPSUM, Colo. — For a brief, poignant stretch of autumn, people in this mountain town found inspiration in a dying boy named Alex Jordan.

He could have been anyone’s little brother: A football-loving 9-year-old with a brave grin and a fatal case of leukemia. As his story percolated through the local news and radio station, it touched no one more than the football team at Eagle Valley High School. Players signed a football for Alex. They pasted A’s to their helmets. They donned orange knee socks to commemorate the cancer ravaging his body. A Facebook page in his honor collected hundreds of supporters.

And when word spread late last month that Alex had died, the grief was real.

Trouble was, Alex was not.

It was all an inexplicable ruse, according to people who unraveled it, a fiction concocted by a 22-year-old woman who had worked with one of the football parents. There was no sick child. There had never been any Alex. The photo that had tugged at people’s hearts, of a bald boy with a shaky smile, had been pulled from the Web site of a cancer foundation.