The only Virginia Tech football game Bill Ortega ever missed was last year's match against North Carolina. His brother got married that day, and Ortega was the reluctant best man. There was, after all, a game to watch, and Ortega is a self-proclaimed die-hard.

The 48-year-old Tech grad will watch Saturday as the third-ranked Hokies face West Virginia University's undefeated Mountaineers. But he will do so from home, not in the stands.

"I go to every home and away game," he said. "I won't be at WVU."

Ortega is among a number of Tech followers who will watch the game from their living rooms. After a 2003 matchup in Morgantown where Tech fans were targets of screamed insults from WVU followers, where batteries and alcohol bottles were tossed on field and where Mountaineer victory was celebrated with fires in the street, some Hokies feel they will literally be targets of a bird hunt in Mountaineer country.

This is the last year the Hokies and Mountaineers play until at least 2016 -- Tech has left the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference -- but many locals say harassment from WVU fans two years ago is still fresh enough to keep them at home.

Yet fans, both those shouting "Go Hokies," and "Let's Gooo Mountaineers," are hoping for one common outcome -- that Saturday's battle stays on the field.

For Ortega, harassment at the 2003 Tech game began as soon as he stepped off a bus, clad in orange and maroon Tech gear. Ortega said the Mountaineer faithful got in his face screaming, "Tech sucks!" He saw people selling shopping carts full of beer. Kids to adults were literally cursing Tech's name. He saw one Hokie fan walk from the stadium before the game. He muttered he was leaving because another fan spilled brew all over him.

Even after the game, a fellow driver spotted Ortega's Virginia Tech license plate and "flipped the bird."

"Today, it clogs my vision of West Virginia," he said.

This year, alumni and Hokie fan clubs in Roanoke and Franklin counties are not making traditional bus trips to Morgantown.

"I really don't know of anybody ... who's going from Franklin County," said Willie McCall, past president of the county's Hokie Club. "I'm not going back."

McCall, a 59 year-old Tech alumnus, went to Morgantown in 2003. He passed booths where T-shirts screaming "F--- Tech," were sold for $10 each. During the game, McCall sat in front of a couple of young WVU grads. "Every other word was f-this and f-that," McCall said.

Ron Jamison, a 1964 Tech grad who lives at Smith Mountain Lake, was also at the game. As soon as his bus pulled into the stadium, he said, a fellow "took a leak on the ... tire."

He said a young woman repeated a two-word phrase -- one of the words an obscenity -- in his face as he walked into the stadium.

"I was so tempted to hit her in the face with the stadium seat that I had," said Jamison, 63.

The game, Jamison said, violated the golden rule of football -- treat the opposing team's fans as you would want to be treated.

When it comes to equal treatment, Pat King, a 43-year-old West Virginia alumnus from Roanoke, said he got it in Blacksburg during the 2002 WVU-Tech game. He was there with a friend and his pregnant wife. Nonetheless, Hokie fans spit on them and hurled beer bottles. He found it ironic because his 11-year-old son was with him, a preteen Hokie fan with a tiny "VT" painted on his cheek.

While he hopes WVU fans are restrained this weekend, King can't help but roll his eyes when he hears Tech fans say they are scared to go to Morgantown.

"It's something a lot of Tech fans like to martyr themselves over," he said. "Tech fans need to be real careful where they point fingers."

Because Saturday's match starts at noon, King feels the game will be calmer. The 2003 game began at night, giving fans all day to get filled with liquid team spirit. The game also came shortly after Tech joined the ACC -- which left WVU fans sore. King remembers hearing Tech's president announce the school would not join the ACC -- a statement reneged just weeks later. Before leaving the Big East, Tech even joined WVU in a lawsuit against the ACC, trying to block it from taking teams.

For this game, said Ken Gray, WVU's vice president for student affairs, extra officers -- campus, city and state police -- will work the stadium. Anyone who misbehaves will face fines, jail or expulsion. The same penalties were given to a handful of fans after the Tech game in 2003.

"It really is a zero-tolerance atmosphere," Gray said.

In attempt to decrease the number of post-game outdoor fires, Morgantown fire officials also ordered upholstered furniture to be removed from porches in student neighborhoods. Mountaineer students have a tradition of celebrating wins by igniting street fires, usually using furniture as fuel. Morgantown topped the nation in the number of intentional street fires between 1997 and 2003 -- more than 1,100.

Yet Leo Burke, a Hokie fullback from 1954, is going to Morgantown. Unlike some Tech fans, he will wear his colors -- a maroon and orange Hokie shirt and hat.

He had no fear going to Morgantown's stadium a half-century ago, and he has no fear now as a 71-year-old retiree.

He knows plenty of Tech fans who will stay home. But when Burke hears fans say they are worried about going to Morgantown, he tells them to put the issue in perspective.

"We're going to a football game," he tells them. "Not to Iraq."