After three and a half hours of waiting and preparing Katie Bogniak and "her boys" are finally here.

Here, as in the Bryce Jordan Center on a Thursday night, waiting for the No. 7 Penn State women's basketball to tip off against conference foe Wisconsin.

Here, where she isn't just a senior majoring in information science and technology but fan royalty.

Here, she is Penn State women's basketball coach Rene Portland.

Well, her look-alike at least.

Adorning a short, blonde wig, just the right amount of eye makeup and a slick business suit, Bogniak is costumed as Rene Portland, flanked as she is each game by her troupe of ten male students, their shirts off and chests painted to look like Penn State women's basketball jerseys.

The guys are loud, rowdy and ready to lead the crowd's cheers.

And then there is Bogniak, the Rene Replica, not as boisterous, but still the fan with the dedication to trump all others. She is the one that organizes this group for every game, sends out the e-mails and makes the phone calls.

She is the spokeswoman for these fanatics. She is the one people gravitate toward.

Soon, the teams will come out of the tunnel and the crowd will start getting revved up, but at the center of the rallying cries will be Bogniak and her group, being the most energetic, the most intense, leading the cheers, doing all they can to help the team.

And Katie and her crew are as much a part of the team as any group of fans could be.

But you still can see it in Bogniak's eyes when she talks about how she wanted to be a part of the team.

This isn't exactly how she wanted it to be.

-- -- --

It seems strange to Bogniak that it ever got to this point. Her and friends -- most of who along with Bogniak are members of the Blue Band -- never planned to put on their Lady Lions masquerade at every home game for an entire year. And never planned for her group to change the face of the entire student section.

It was just going to be a one-time thing with her friends and her boyfriend, Aaron Miller (senior-mechanical engineering). Just something fun and different to do on a Sunday.

Or perhaps it was a Thursday; Bogniak can't even quite remember when the tradition started.

"The first time we did it, it was just fun, so we did it again," she says. "We didn't know we would still be doing it now. We never expected it to boom like this -- not like this. I didn't think I'd be sitting here talking to [newspapers] about it."

Instead, she has been talked to by and mentioned in newspapers on several occasions now. In a cubby hole underneath the tall wooden desk in her room sits a pile of every newspaper that has photographed or talked about her and her boys.

Bogniak's room is essentially a chronology of Lady Lions hoops in the past year.

A picture of her crew with the real Lions after the squad won last year's Big Ten regular season title; each of the bobble heads given out at the Jordan Center in the past year with her favorite, that of Rene Portland, standing front and center, autographed by the head coach and given personally to Bogniak by Portland herself; an 8 1/2 by 11 inch card that says, "I saw Kelly Mazzante break the Big Ten record."

All this looks down from the top shelf of her desk as Bogniak sits starting to prepare for the night's game at 8. It is currently 4:30 p.m.

She is busy making calls and checking e-mails, making sure there will be enough guys at the game painting their chests to represent every member of the Lions.

She has a pool of 20 guys to draw from, and she keeps track of who will be painting for each game with an Excel spreadsheet. Aside from Bogniak and a handful of loyal male members of the group, the rest tend to come and go on somewhat of a rotating basis. So this is necessary to keep them all straight, she says. Much like the coach of a real team, many of the organizational responsibilities fall on Bogniak.

"Don't you like how she does this: calling everybody, e-mails," Bogniak's friend and fellow Lady Lions look-alike Nate Mallory says later, as the group is standing outside the Jordan Center at 5:15 p.m., waiting for the doors to open at 6:30. "The rest of us just say, 'yeah we want to go to the game' and show up."

So maybe all the attention she gets is exactly as it should be.

Without her, the Lady Lions' imposters might not exist. She is the most visible and well-known of the group, but maybe that's how it's supposed to be.

-- -- --

And to think for a time she didn't want it this way.

All the attention, all the adulation in the Lady Lions community. People stopping her as she walks through the concourse of the Jordan Center just to say hi or take a picture with "Little Rene." Everyone knowing who she is, recognizing and loving what she does to help the team.

What loyal, dedicated fan wouldn't want that?

But for a time Bogniak wanted something different.

She wanted to be part of the team in a far more anonymous way -- as a Lady Lions team manager for this season.

"I knew I would have to give up being Rene, but I wanted to travel with the team and be as much a part of the team as I could," Bogniak says.

Bogniak has a love for this team greater than most. At around the same time she started dressing up like Portland for games, she started to become friends with junior center Hazel Joseph when the two were in the same project group for class. Through her contact with Joseph -- and her dedication dressing as Portland -- Bogniak has come to know many members of the team as friends.

"A lot of this [dressing up for every home game] stemmed because we got to meet a lot of the girls," she says. "I love those girls. They are seriously some of the best people on this college campus. They are so focused, and they didn't just come to college to drink and go to bars."

It was this respect that made Bogniak want to get closer to the team. But she found that, although it was the way she wanted it to be, it wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Bogniak would have been a shoo-in to get a manager's job, but unfortunately, her Blue Band practice overlapped with basketball practice.

She talks about the experience with a certain reverence of what could have been. "When I didn't get it, I was really upset" -- her eyes still get a little glassy -- "I wanted to be more a part of the team, but with Blue Band it just didn't work. I think I put all my frustrations from that into doing this better" -- she points to her chest-painted group -- "I hope we are helping them. I just want to be as much a part of the team as I can."

Bogniak says there are, of course, no hard feelings. "Maybe things did work out they way they should," she says.

Anyway, she's grown quite attached to "being Little Rene," and she's not even quite sure how she will cope with giving it up.

-- -- --

Bogniak is a senior. She will graduate in May.

As time winds down in the second half of the Lions 66-50 win against Wisconsin, she stands in front of the chest-painted Lady Lions -- "her boys" -- knowing she probably only has tonight's game and one other left as Little Rene.

Throughout this night she tries to rationalize, tries to convince herself that the end is not coming. She says things like "I would come back for every game if I was within two hours from here" and "I should get a scholarship to grad school here and just be Mini Rene for two more years."

But in the end, she acknowledges the approaching finality. She will graduate and get a job somewhere and Sunday's game against Purdue will be her last dressed as Portland.

But those in her Lady Lions crew don't want the tradition to end with her, and Bogniak admits she will have to locate a replacement. It won't be easy finding one; the new Rene would have to be at every home game and would probably have the responsibility of organizing the chest-painters before every game.

"I want to give it to one of my friends, I want it to be someone I care about," she says. "Because it's my thing, and it means so much to me."

Here, in the Bryce Jordan Center where Bogniak has spent nearly half her day even though she has a test the next morning, she stands and wonders how it got to this point and how it can continue when she's gone.

How things have changed since her and her group started -- these days students stand instead of sitting at home games.

And now, how she can pass it on and keep it that way, for the title of Little Rene has taken an aura of its own.

"I talked to a couple girls last night about doing it and they were scared," Bogniak says. "They were afraid of being Mini Rene and of people not liking them as much. I was surprised people would be intimidated by it."

Such prestige associated with dressing up like Rene? Bogniak never thought it would be this way.

But that's exactly the way it is. And exactly the way it was supposed to be.