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MORGANTOWN — The 23rd-ranked WVU women’s basketball team will host Appalachian State at 10:15 a.m. today for its annual Education Day game.

What that means is there will be about 10,000 screaming children bused in from elementary schools across the state. They will be loud. Their screams will hit a high-enough pitch to probably break glass at some point.

It will certainly be a different type of feel inside the Hope Coliseum.

The one guy who couldn’t care less is WVU head coach Mark Kellogg. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever again at any point in the future will Kellogg be the guy who complains about having to overcome any sort of adversity during a game.

Not after what he and his Mountaineers went through last Friday in knocking off Duke, 57-49, inside The Greenbrier Resort.

What Kellogg went through in beating the Blue Devils would be a coach’s version of a really bad dream.

Like, remember when we were all kids and you dreamed about standing at your school locker without any pants on or you’re running down the hallway to get to class and that hallway just kept getting longer and longer?

For a basketball coach, the version of that dream is looking around a packed arena in a big game and your best player isn’t there and your depth isn’t there and, well, your players are nowhere to be found.

The one exception to this is the fictional Norman Dale, who in the fantastic movie “Hoosiers,” chose to finish a game with just four players rather than subbing in a player who refused to listen to him.

“My team is on the floor,” Dale told the referee.

Last Friday was not fiction, though. You know the story. You know about the shoving match at the end of the first half. You know how WVU (4-0) had four of its starters ejected and was forced to finish the game with just five players on its available roster.

What we don’t know is the inside scoop, which did come later via a social media post released by WVU. In it, we got an inside look to how Kellogg handled a nightmarish situation with poise and confidence.

On the video, his players are yelling, shrugging and dipping their heads into their hands during halftime. There is chaos and panic.

Just not with Kellogg, who, oh by the way, is going for his 500th career coaching victory today.

“We have five players,” Kellogg tells his team. “So, we are going to have to play our what?”

A player quietly answers, “Our hardest.”

“We have to play absolutely the hardest we’ve ever played,” Kellogg continued. “It’s going to take the five of us and we’re going to figure this out.”

What happened next was maybe something out of Hollywood. Those five players – starter Sydney Shaw and four bench players – manhandled the then 15th-ranked Blue Devils. WVU outscored Duke, 24-9 in the third quarter.

“We need you, all right?” Kellogg said during a timeout, urging his team to give a supreme effort. “We’ve got timeouts. We’ll use them in the fourth (quarter) if we need them.”

Later in the game, Kellogg is sitting at another timeout slamming the end of his marker against his clipboard.

“Possession by possession,” he screamed. “Defend and rebound. Defend and rebound. We have to defend without fouling, but you’ve got to play hard.”

Duke, inevitably, began to draw closer.

“There’s no way, if they don’t score, it’s impossible for them to win the game,” Kellogg said.

And somehow, some way, Kellogg and his Iron 5 came away with, maybe, what should be one of the most memorable WVU basketball wins of all-time.

We’re talking both men and women. Like this game, all things considered, should nestle up somewhere alongside John Beilein’s upset of No. 2 seed Wake Forest in the 2005 NCAA tournament and Bob Huggins’ victory over Kentucky in 2010 to send WVU to the Final Four.

Dead serious.

Certainly what Kellogg did that night, his coaching performance, would be in that same breath as what Huggins or Beilein accomplished in their most glorious of moments.

And if there was ever a shroud of doubt remaining that Kellogg wasn’t the right guy or the right coach or whatever, let those doubts be erased completely.

He is the right guy, the right coach. Today. Tomorrow. For as long as WVU can keep him around.