Playing a night game under the lights of Beaver Stadium in front of 107,000-plus people is undoubtedly a dream come true for many members of this year's Penn State football team.

The last time the Nittany Lions played in primetime was 2002, when they blew out a heavily favored Nebraska team in front of a Beaver Stadium record crowd of 110,753 people. All the hype surrounding Saturday's game makes it entirely possible that the attendance record set against Nebraska could fall when the No. 16 Lions take on No. 6 Ohio State.

"I think it's great," tight end Isaac Smolko said. "It's going to be a very exciting atmosphere, it's going to be loud. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be a great game."

Maybe so, but the disruption to the normal game-day routine that a night game causes is enough to drive some players crazy.

Penn State players spend the night before home games at Toftrees Resort and Conference Center, a few miles northwest of Beaver Stadium. For afternoon games, the team leaves for Beaver Stadium roughly two hours before game time, making the nerve-jangling wait mercifully short.

That's not the case for a night game.

"It's tough waiting all day, sitting there watching other games and just having to wait," Smolko said. "You kind of just want to get out there and play. But I've always loved night games. It pumps you up more playing at night. You have to wait it out, but when the game kickoff finally comes, you're going to be ready."

Safety Calvin Lowry also said he preferred playing games under the lights.

"Just sitting around the hotel can get kind of old," Lowry said. "But I prefer night games. Under the lights, it's a whole different ball game."

Penn State's defense is a veteran unit, and, as such, is well equipped to deal with pre-game jitters. As for the young corps of receivers, though, the older players on both sides of the ball have taken the group under their collective wings to prepare them for the mental battle they will face throughout Saturday afternoon.

"[Playing at night] builds the anxiety; it brings a lot more nerves to the table and that may be a small problem with younger players," safety Chris Harrell said. "We just have to really, as seniors, do everything we can to calm everyone down and get us ready to go."

Harrell and his fellow seniors have sung the praises of the unnaturally poised group of freshmen all year, but this weekend is an exceptional situation with the hype surrounding the game.

"We've been telling the younger guys what to expect with us being in the hotel for that long a period of time," Lowry said. "There are going to be things that we do, and by word of mouth we are just telling guys to treat it like any other game."

It is not surprising that wideout Derrick Williams and utility man Justin King would be able to comfortably step into the limelight almost directly after highly publicized recruiting processes, but less-heralded freshmen, including wideouts Deon Butler and Jordan Norwood, have also responded with a surprising amount of poise.

"I've never seen this amount of maturity from the young players," defensive end Matthew Rice said. "There's not really that much that I can tell them; just to watch film and get ready."

Though the circumstances surrounding this weekend's game are exceptional, for Penn State to be successful it has to look at the showdown with Ohio State as just another game, a fact Coach Joe Paterno is well aware of.

"It is a big game in a lot of different ways for a lot of different people," Paterno said. "I have tried to approach it with the idea that it is another football game for us."