EAST LANSING, Mich. --
It will be a long time from now, if ever, before the images subside.
Who was clever enough to bring oranges? How ugly the Land Grant Trophy is in person. How Penn State took over rest stops on the road to East Lansing or how it took over the town of every away team in 2005. How a visiting team's cheering section can be so loud, the home team has trouble running its offense.
At best, Penn State had 5,000 screaming fans inside Spartan Stadium on Saturday. Its capacity is a little more than 75,000. But at some point late in the fourth quarter, it didn't matter that most of the stadium was green and white, or that the Spartans were trying to secure a bowl berth or simply fighting to win a meaningful game for the first time since September.
Regardless of how close the score wound up being, this was a lopsided affair from the Nittany Lions plane touching down to the four touchdowns they'd eventually score.
You couldn't expect the Lions to have any sympathy for the Spartans on their senior day, or for finishing the season one win shy of postseason play again. Not after Penn State has led college football in sympathy for two years, not after Joe Paterno looked like a defeated man for so long.
Few things make sense about this particular Penn State football team. We should have realized that after fourth-and-15 way back against Northwestern.
Michael Robinson wasn't supposed to beat the learning curve that comes with playing quarterback this quickly. The early-season fumbling was supposed to affect him mentally for the rest of the season. Then his reads would become blurry, and force the Lions to become one-dimensional, as teams returned to keying in on the run game by putting eight defenders in the box.
The new play-calling would never work. Penn State could only win ugly, with fullback dives and cheap passes into the flat, and throwing the deep ball would only be an occasional mistake.
The offensive line was supposed to be the weakest portion on the team. Off-the-field issues were supposed to see key players dismissed. More players should have been injured. Less players would actually step up. The freshman wideouts would drop balls in crucial moments, ultimately revealing their true age.
If you didn't see this coming straight at you, tell me this wasn't in your rearview mirror, with the inevitable explosion seeming closer than it appeared.
Time for reflection
So now it is the Monday before Thanksgiving, and for a change it is OK to talk about the ol' football team at the dinner table. There is a bowl game to look forward to now -- where? -- your guess is as good as the suspect system that will ultimately decide.
But in the bigger picture, the site of the game is really not that important. Whether this team had won eight, nine, hey, it probably should have won all of its games, the point is it could have remained face down at the bottom of the Big Ten and most people would have accepted it as the natural progression of things.
But remember how your elementary school fights at recess played out. There would always be a slither of respect for the guy who knew he was going to lose the fight but chose to square off anyway. But the guy who never even raised a hand in the face of adversity was always viewed as a coward or timid, failing to experience neither success nor failure.
You can only be so good for so long. There comes a time when everyone gets dethroned.
His success is no accident
The press conferences play back like records. From what I am told, the sound bytes are identical across decades.
For a long time I have inwardly wrestled with how one man can win so many games and yet seem so detached from his players and seem so uninvolved in the decision-making process.
It bothered me that Paterno doesn't wear the headset like most coaches do. That sometimes during timeouts, he'd be 20 feet away from the huddle, staring into the skyline as though he were on a beach. When the Lions were winning it wasn't a big deal, though.
Winning cures all signs of apparent apathy, but losing normally garners some type of change. In today's college football game, talent has indeed knocked experience into the backseat.
If a player is good enough, he will play right away and he'll learn how to keep composed as he goes. Certain things can't be avoided, but for the most part, Paterno has stuck to his convictions.
He often repeats himself, and on first, second and third reference, it seems as is he's just being difficult to work with. But soon enough, you start to realize he actually believes these philosophies he preaches.
There is one familiar motto that Paterno has often said that has now begun to make more sense after such a resurgent season.
"The way you handle praise, and the way you handle criticism will ultimately determine how far you go," Paterno has said in the past.
And at the end of the day, no matter how hard people tried to get him to step down, you can't keep a man from doing the one thing he loves.
"He wants to keep coaching," Lions center E.Z. Smith said. "As long as he wants to, he should be able to."
After all, what else would a soon-to-be 79-year-old man be doing on Saturdays?
