Don't you love out-of-towners?

So I'm walking down College Avenue Saturday evening with my old friend Jeff, whom I call Deacs because I find it easier to pronounce than "Jeff, " and my girlfriend, near where the stairs once led to Peace-a-Pizza, hours after Penn State's stirring 22-20 win against Purdue.

Suddenly, a young man wearing a bright blue Penn State jersey with the number 43 attached to it hurries by.

"Dodd," says Deacs, turning at me with a look of disgust on his face, (He too, calls me by a different name, as he too finds "Geoff" difficult to pronounce.) "if I see one more Brandon Short jersey, I think I'm going to puke."

I shook my head.

"Deacs," I responded. "That's not a Brandon Short jersey. That's the number of Adam Taliaferro, the freshman cornerback who was injured in the Ohio State game last week."

Now, I've always looked at Deacs as a poet with his words. He knows it, too, I think, but he's much too modest to admit to anything more than an occasional dip into the dramatic vernacular. This one, however, took no effort to elicit from his mouth.

"Dodd," he says, "every time I think I've reached the peak of my ignorance, I surprise myself."

Funny thing was, he knew of Taliaferro, at least by reading the papers, yet he failed to draw the correlation between Saturday's game and the presence of all those "Brandon Short" jerseys and No. 43 buttons worn by numerous fans.

And speaking of ignorance, it's amazing how little we reporters notice while enclosed in that fishbowl known as the press box.

We have a chance to go out on the field with five minutes remaining in the game, which is extremely beneficial. Some of these people, you might think, have completely forgotten how to watch a football game with anything other than a notebook and tape recorder. But when you walk down there, should it be during a game like the one on Saturday, you tend to relinquish the notebook to the back pocket, and you start to write with your eyes, not your hands.

For instance, I guarantee you this: Drew Brees heard nothing on that final drive. Nada. Unless the Purdue helmets were wired to one another, with tiny microphones on the chinstraps, Brees heard zilch. You think 96,000 people sound loud from the seats? Well, all that noise filters directly to the field, directly into the helmets of the 22 players out there. I couldn't hear a person two feet from me, and I was on the sideline.

You notice those little 43s on the back of each Nittany Lion helmet, in support of Taliaferro, a man who, barring a miracle, had his gridiron dreams quashed last week at Ohio State and now remains partially paralyzed in a hospital in Philadelphia. But Deacs was right. Those were Brandon Short jerseys. The Student Book Store, to my knowledge, didn't suddenly have a field day handing out Taliaferro jerseys after he got hurt (which, I think, would have been a nice show of support).

But Short graduated last year, and he left State College to play for the New York Giants. His number remained, however, just as they all do. It went to a person ready to continue Short's legacy, if not at the same position, at least on the same side of the ball.

But Deacs didn't notice that. It's not his fault, though. He's not from around here.