Last year, Joe's birthday seemed to come a bit quicker than it had in years past.

Joe laughed excitedly the mid-April night before it happened, knowing that his pee-wee football coach, Frank Conforti, had arranged a special trip for the youngster and a few close friends.

The caravan would be leaving early that Saturday morning, hoping to arrive long before anyone else. And besides, Conforti had an old friend he wanted the birthday boy to meet.

Conforti used to coach Penn State's Justin Kurpeikis at Central Catholic High, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Not directly — Conforti coached the freshmen while Kurpeikis played varsity — but he dealt with Justin enough so that the two had built a lasting friendship.

It is one, Conforti says, that he tries painstakingly to keep. The two talk several times a week, more than most kids talk to their parents.

"I'll tell you what," Conforti says. "If you ever have something to ask me about Justin Kurpeikis, and it's 3 a.m., pick up the phone."

That was the Justin that Conforti wanted Joe to meet. The coach, who left Central Catholic to coach the Morning Side Little Vikings peewee program two years ago, wanted the kids to meet this man, whom he described as the "kind of kid that, if you had a daughter, you'd want your kid to marry him," the "throwback from the 1950s-60s," with the "clean cut, ivy league, yes sir, no sir, look you in the eyes" persona.

"He's the kind of kid you want in the foxhole next to you in a war," Conforti adds.

Conforti, Justin says, never forgot what the game is all about.

"He runs a youth program now, and tries to instill that in the kids that are coming through," Justin says. "He coaches at a level where you can still make a difference in kids' lives, at that age."

Justin, Conforti says, never forgot what the term "role model" is all about. He plays at a level where he, too, can still make a difference in kids' lives.

Each of Joe's friends wanted to talk to Justin. That wasn't unusual. They came to see Justin, the resident superstar. But on that day, it seemed as if the tables had turned, that Justin had come to see them.

"He made them feel like they were the celebrities, instead of the other way around," Conforti said.

And on that Saturday morning, Justin gave Joe his star treatment.

After talking to Joe's friends, Justin lifted his head, exposing a rarely seen neck. Looking around, he tried to find the center of attention.

"Coach, which one's Joe?" Justin asked.

"This one," Conforti said.

With that, Kurpeikis slung a T-shirt off his back, one that he had carried all morning, and it flew into Joe's hands, opening in his palms as it got there.

What Joe saw wasn't a Nittany Lion, or even a Penn State logo.

He saw ink.

Every member of the Penn State football team, including Joe Paterno, the legendary coach now three wins shy of the all-time Div. I-A coaching mark, had given that shirt their John Hancock.

"If you're going to do it, you do it right," Conforti says, reminiscing.

Conforti was right. The senior defensive end had negated nearly every stereotype that plagues superstar athletes today. Sign autographs for free? Go out of your way for a fan? What?

Justin is a throwback. He would probably look better in wool clothes and a leather helmet than nylon threads and a plastic one. And that morning, Justin remembered that half a life ago he was standing where Joe was, looking at a hero.

For Justin, that hero was Jack Lambert, a Hall of Fame middle linebacker who played with the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1964-74. He actually liked all those old Steelers, part of the infamous Steel Curtain defense in the '70s, but Lambert found a place above Justin's bed in the form of a poster.

Today, that poster remains in his room, in the same place, in his home in Allison Park, just outside Pittsburgh.

"That's been his idol his entire life," said Justin's father Len. "When the boys used to play in the back yard, he'd be Lambert and his brother Chris would be Too-Tall Jones."

The name fit. Chris had always been a good deal larger than his brother — two inches in height, about 50 pounds in weight when the two reached adulthood.

Football started for Justin when he was 4. His father, Len, had bought a green tackling dummy for he and his brother, Chris, who was 7 at the time.

"It was no different than a dad going out and playing catch with his son," Len says. "If both boys wanted to play football, they were going to learn at an early age."

A small hill used to overlook the Kurpeikis' house. The two would take turns holding a ball, running down the hill at top speed, while the other would swing the dummy at him.

A few years later, Chris joined a small peewee team called the Windsor Wildcats. It was a program meant for fourth- and fifth-graders, and Chris signed up immediately. He was the biggest kid on the team, something he would face, or enjoy, nearly his entire life.

Playing football never bothered me, but they always say biggest tree in forest always gets the strongest winds," Chris says.

Justin, on the other hand, didn't catch any wind. In fact, he was told he would be too young to play with his brother in the league.

It hardly stopped him.

"Actually, I had to lie about my age to get me on the team because I was younger," Justin said. "That, I really don't remember a whole lot about."

Justin played tight end immediately, a position he had groomed the basics to after getting hit with the swinging dummy so much.

Still, Justin remembered Jack Lambert. That was his hero.

"I remember the first time we ever put him in linebacker," Len says. "First play, didn't have a clue what to do. Next three plays, made all three tackles.

It clicked, if you know what I mean."

"There's no doubt about it man," Chris says. "I remember every year after his freshman year in high school, he'd better start to prepare himself to play guard. He wanted to be a linebacker.

"Since he could walk, always wanted to be a linebacker."

"I don't know about that, but I guess it just showed I had some instincts for the game," says Justin, laughing. "That probably came from playing so much in the backyard."

But Justin didn't want to just be a linebacker. He wanted to be Jack Lambert. He wanted to be the grass-in-helmet, dirt-on-hands, mud-on-jersey 1970's era-player. A "tough" guy.

"I truly, truly believe that the way that those guys played it was the way it was meant to be played," Justin says. "It has become such a game of technicalities and specialization, and just so much concern on 40 times and everything else, but in my mind, it's still a game of hitting and a game of heart. If you have those, regardless of anything else, you can still play this game, no matter what the era.

"There's no measure for a guy's heart, like a 40 time, a vertical jump or a bench press."

He wanted to look like the players he'd watch with Len and Chris on those old NFL films, and at least from a standpoint of heart, he wanted to look like the same kid he saw in the Windsor Wildcat home videos, movies that Justin called "pretty comical."

"I think those were more enjoyable than sitting back and watching the games," Len says. "I think there was more appeal in the history of the game.

"They read all the books, from Vince Lombardi, good books on the history of football."

Justin wanted to be tough. Because, as Justin says, with "tough" comes respect. And with respect comes pride.

"I guess it was because of the way my father would talk about them, and how they were just tough," Justin says. "That's something I've always wanted to achieve, I don't know if it's consciously or not.

"That's the greatest compliment in the world to me. If you have a teammate who plays with you who says, man, that guy was tough . . . because when my father would tell me stories about guys he played against or when we watched those old NFL films and he'd say, man that guy was tough, that's what got to me.

"And somewhere along the line, in our world, it's transferred to someone earning respect because of how tough they are to other things, to how flashy they are and stuff like that. But I still look at the game like that was the way it is meant to be played, the way those guys played it."

Fifteen years later, Justin has become his own Jack Lambert. But the kids today don't know who Lambert was. They know who Justin Kurpeikis is.

"Justin Kurpeikis is a real "blue collar" kind of player," Paterno says. "He may not get the national attention he should get, but he is one heck of a football player. He plays every play all out and practices the same way. There can't be anybody who has played better consistently game after game after game, as Kurpeikis has played, particularly when we struggled. He is that kind of player."

His teammate, James Boyd, takes it one step further.

"I think he is like an old throwback," Boyd says. "He's hard nosed. He doesn't care about how he looks. The blood could be coming out of his nose and he wouldn't wipe it off."

Justin's mother, Kathy, agrees. But it takes a conversation about tattoos, of which Justin has two, to get her talking of her son's "traditional" roots.

One, which wraps around his left calf muscle, is an impression of his parent's wedding band.

"Justin is very much a traditionalist," Kathy says. "I never was a part of any of this. I would assume there may be a Nittany Lion in the future, but I don't know.

"They're awful permanent," she adds, laughing. "I've known people who had tattoos when they were popular a couple of decades ago, and I'm not sure they look the same."

Inside the tattoo are four sets of initials — his grandparents. And for good reason. He doesn't speak about it often, though.

Of Justin's grandparents, the two on Len's side are living today, both in Pittsburgh.

The other two, however, are deceased. But their story remains as lively as ever.

"I know the basic story, probably as much as you do now," Justin says. "I never heard it firsthand from my grandfather, cause he died when I was younger."

His grandfather on Kathy's side, William Robb, was shot down three times in World War II, twice behind enemy lines, while he bombed oil fields in Yugoslavia.

"Actually, he was picked up by Tito's underground people," Len says, speaking of the Yugoslavian leader who fought to make the nation Communist. "He had to swim to a (U.S.) submarine in the Adriatic Sea.

"They were people who took a wagon train to Kansas," says Len, adding that he's still amazed at the 1800's-like, survival-first, intense work ethic that symbolized his wife's parents.

"You never measure a man by pounds and inches," Len says. "You've got to look at the heart."

It runs in the family. Chris, in fact, might even have a better story than Justin. Recruited by the nation's top football schools, Chris started attending Notre Dame, but soon transferred to Michigan, all on a full football scholarship.

Chris, who stands at 6-foot-6 and weighs nearly 300 pounds, had the size over which NFL scouts drool. He would toss away opponents like paper into a wastebasket.

Then one day, early into his sophomore campaign, he felt a twinge in his lower back. Turned out to be a degenerative disk disorder, one that would force him to retire early.

He never even earned a varsity letter.

"Man, it's been such a long time since I dealt with it," Chris says. "It hasn't really bothered me. Since I graduated, life has moved pretty fast.

"The lowest point of it all was my fifth year and Justin's redshirt year, when Michigan was playing at Penn State and both in Top 3," Chris adds. "Ever since then, I just kind of worked through it.

"I realize that there are more things in life."

For his sake, at least, Michigan won that game, 34-8.

Today, instead of playing in games, he travels around the Big Ten states to see his brother play. But, as his mother points out, Chris does not play the game through Justin.

"I don't think it's a matter of fulfilling a need for Chris," Kathy says. "You don't vicariously live through someone else, through the game. It truly comes. His reason for making the games comes from the love of his brother."

Adds Justin: "We've always had a good relationship. Seeing what he went through before me really helped me when it became my turn to decide where to go to school. He's always someone I've looked up to, and he's always been there with help and support."

For Chris, it's always the same routine. Catch a flight from O'Hare at 7 p.m., arrive in Pittsburgh around 9:30. Rent a car, drive to State College. Arrive around 1 a.m.

And that's just the home games. He makes them all. The away games, too. He only missed two games this year — Southern California, because of work, and Minnesota, because of his recent marriage.

It's about the only excuse he'll give.

And Justin knows it.

"When I'm coming out of the tunnel, that's like the final peak of all the preparation for the week mentally and physically," Justin says. "I feel like I'm absolutely ready, absolutely on edge and ready to play a football game. We run out and I look up and try to find my father and my family in the stands. That's pretty much where I just lose it, and I know I'm ready to go.

"I believe every time I step on the field, that I'm not only playing for my own pride and the people I care about's pride, but I'm taking my family name onto the field. The guy across from me is doing the same thing. How I perform and how I carry myself is a direct reflection on my family."