SALT LAKE CITY — Britain Covey sells tickets. Anybody in the University of Utah ticket department would tell you that. Nobody else on the team makes the open field look as inviting or as graceful as the returning leading receiver from last year’s Pac-12 South championship group. Covey fakes and shifts with the best of them, routinely throwing defenders off-kilter with the sort of game-changing ability rarely seen in college football.

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Hence, Britain Covey, the All-American, sells tickets.

The BYU athletic department would tell you the same. Because at 11, Covey was the sell, an exuberant kid pumping his fist, hollering in excitement, his navy blue BYU T-shirt on full display. At 11, Covey was on a poster to help sell BYU basketball tickets for a game against the Wyoming Cowboys on Jan. 31, 2009. The Cougars would later win handily, 84-60. So all these years later, as his family members discuss how so much has changed within the Covey clan, they can’t avoid thinking of those days of young Britain, alongside his siblings and cousins, as devoted BYU fanatics.

“They would just go nuts,” said Stephen Covey, Britain’s older brother who played at BYU.

Britain would play as BYU on the now-defunct EA Sports “NCAA Football” video game before and even sometimes after attending Cougar games. The Covey home is just off Canyon Road by the BYU intramural fields in Provo. It’s a five-minute walk to LaVell Edwards Stadium. Around the same age that he made it as a promotional star, his brother Stephen said Covey would even wear a T-shirt that said, “Friends don’t let friends go to the U.” Since he was 5, Covey would suit up in blue, along with the rest of his immediate family and extended family, and set out a few blocks away to sit in the same seats in the exact same portal they will again Thursday night at kickoff.

“Portal PP,” Covey said.

He won’t be there Thursday, though. He hopes to be down on the field, as No. 18, inside the stadium that bred his love for a game he now stars in, in a rivalry where he is, in fact, like so many others: in a different color now from what he was as a kid then.

“I love being up here (in Salt Lake),” he said, “but I’ve always dreamed of playing in that stadium one day.”

When older brother Stephen was on the team, Britain idolized his brother’s teammates like Todd Watkins, Luke Ashworth and Andrew George. He hung out with Harvey Unga, Brandon Howard and Matt Reynolds when they’d stop at the Covey household to decompress.

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“He really tended to gravitate toward receivers, which is interesting, because I had him playing quarterback when I was coaching him in flag football,” said Britain’s dad, Stephen.

While Covey went on to star as an undersized state-title-winning high school quarterback at nearby Timpview, that gravitational pull toward former great BYU wideouts paid off. It paid off for Utah. The Utes were the first team to offer Covey. They came calling in the spring of his junior year.

“Once Utah offered, to have someone believe in you like that, suddenly you are really excited about that,” Stephen Covey said. “You’re starting to look at it with new eyes.”

It took some getting used to from, well, everyone. Both sides of his extended family are devout Cougars fans, lifelong supporters of BYU, and most everyone in his family attended BYU. Covey’s dad and his eight siblings all went to BYU. His uncle, Sean, was a quarterback for the Cougars in the 1980s. In total, Covey has 27 aunts and uncles and 85 first cousins, and yep, you guessed it, they all grew up supporting BYU.

Covey truly is a magnetic young man, a player who makes Broadway references when discussing avoiding slow offensive starts and, as evidenced in a recent profile in The Salt Lake Tribune, has memorized obscure facts about so many of his teammates that it’s impossible to ignore why he’s both a fan favorite and a favorite among his Utah peers. It’s easy, then, to see why it was so easy for his family to ditch the blue — albeit temporarily — for Ute red.

He’s a special player and special to them.

“It’s amazing what family loyalty is,” said Stephen Covey. “I’ll never forget going to the first Utah game where Brit was a freshman and they’re playing Michigan. A big opening game. And there we are, all the Coveys, at a pregame meal, and there’s my brother Sean, who started a year and a half at BYU, and he’s dressed in red and all my siblings and we counted a couple of different times, there were as many as 80 Coveys at one game, all dressed in red.”

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Britain’s brother, Stephen, won’t be there Thursday night decked out in red. He lives on the East Coast now and has a young family. He thought about buying a ticket out, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’s too superstitious. The last time he was at LaVell Edwards Stadium for the rivalry game, he was on the sidelines, back in 2009 when BYU beat Utah in overtime, 26-23, on a game-winning touchdown by George, who was Britain’s youth leader in their local ward congregation. He hasn’t been back since. Here’s a former BYU player so stressed about the rivalry game and wanting it to go in his brother’s favor that he can’t even bring himself to come back to his old stomping grounds.

“I don’t want to go back there and feel like it’s my fault if Utah loses,” he said.

There is plenty riding on this game for Britain himself, which at the moment, stretches beyond the rivalry. Utah’s star playmaker suffered a torn ACL in the Pac-12 Championship game last December and has been rehabbing extensively to get back to the point of feeling like his usual self. But it hasn’t come without trials. A few months after the initial surgery, Covey’s knee swelled and swelled and the pain was so severe he could barely walk.

A second follow-up surgery was necessary to clean out the residual issues in his already surgically repaired knee. Covey said last week he was still in “wait-and-see mode” in regard to how close he is to being back to 100 percent. He had some swelling issues early last week, but said he plans on suiting up Thursday night. Utah coach Kyle Whittingham confirmed as much Monday at his first news conference of the season.

It’s quite a far way he’s come in the last two months considering the lingering pain and discomfort Covey was dealing with as recently as prior to the start of fall camp July 31.

“I was thinking about a month and a half ago, there’s no way he’s going to play against BYU,” brother Stephen said. “I’ve talked to him enough to where I know he’s back. I know how badly he wants to play in this game. Fall camp was the big test and he’s made amazing progress. He’s shown me some of his film from fall camp and I’m like, ‘Wow, it doesn’t look like he’s missed a beat.’”

Covey’s family still have their BYU season tickets, and when time allows for it, Covey still tries to drive south home to Provo to see games. He has four former high school teammates and close friends who play for the Cougars.

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“Right when I get inside those lines, it’s going to be fury,” he said, laughing. “There’s going to be no love once I get inside the lines. But I’m not one of those guys who hates the other side.”

Covey is incapable of hate. It’s why Thursday evening when he’s down on the field warming up, he’ll be able to glance up at Portal PP and then over at Portal DD and see a significant dabbing of red in a deep sea of blue. Britain’s dad, Stephen, said he still roots for BYU in every game they play in, just not in the rivalry game. And he’ll be glowing in red inside LaVell Edwards Stadium, along with the dozens upon dozens of other Coveys, there to see their son, brother, nephew and cousin do what he’s always done so astonishingly well.

“Every single person knows why I’m wearing red — it’s because I love my son,” he said. “I think (BYU fans would) be doing the same thing and wearing red, too.”

(Photo: Steve Dykes / Getty Images)