The Quizzical Comment has occupied many minds, conversations and Web sites the past several days with no real insight as to exactly what was meant by the strange salvo Bill Stewart offered to end his press conference Saturday night.

I’ve seen and heard a bunch of different variations of the story, but here’s the exact recap: He talked up the bowl representatives, detailed the game’s positives and negatives, complimented Pat White, explained the decision to bench Noel Devine and Robert Sands and then launched a defense of his program, staff and players. At the end, he dropped that little puzzle on our table and simply walked away with a gentlemanly, “Good evening.”

There was no trigger in the press conference. It just happened. As for explanations, it seemed pretty simple. He was irritated by someone or something — or both — and he counter-punched. Turns out we were right, but for all the wrong reasons.

The roots of Stewart’s comments go … prepare yourself … all the way back to the Fairmont Opera in the 1890s and a performance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Cub and Boy Scout honor.

There, a famed Wetzel County character, William Olliver Gallagher, delivered an oratory known as “Glorious Old Wetzel,” after he was pushed onstage and asked to introduce himself.

Gallagher, known as “Oll” and “Ol’ Gallahue,” once was described as a “combination of Mark Twain and the typical mountaineer” in a Wheeling newspaper.

A man with a large handlebar mustache, he was a known defender of the honor of Wetzel County against what he considered the uppity folks in Wheeling, then the state capital.

When Tom Loehr heard fellow Wetzel County native Stewart’s conclusion to his press conference, he knew the words, their context and he had heard them — or similar ones — before.

Loehr, 59, is a former state senator and state treasurer who now is a Charleston business entrepreneur. He went to school with Stewart’s older brother, Ted, in Wetzel County.

Loehr said Tuesday that many New Martinsville natives know part of Gallagher’s colorful monologue about Wetzel by heart.

Count the WVU football coach among them.

The exact finishing words of “Oll” that night at the opera house went like this:

“Glorious old Wetzel! Whose sons are brave and daughters fair, and which today produces gas enough to light the world, oil enough to lubricate it, and brains enough to rule it.”

In essence, William Stewart is today’s William Gallagher — defender of his native Wetzel County, effective speaker, reviewed in newspapers, a “combination of Mark Twain and the typical mountaineer.” There is, of course, one exception and if anyone wants to start a petition in which people beg Stewart to grow a handlebar mustache, I’ll gladly publicize it here.