If I hear the words "Meridian fight" one more time I might be tempted to jump in front of a CATA bus.

The football players took their punishment, and it's time to move on from the events of the past 16 months and refocus on the upcoming season.

Now I'm not condoning the violent actions of some of the players. Obviously, there's something very wrong with heading to an apartment en masse "for revenge," as one player said in Judicial Affairs documents.

There are 40,000 students in this town, which means 40,000 egos. With so many people crammed into such a small town, tempers are bound to flare and fights will happen.

This is the time of our lives when we make mistakes, pay for them and learn from them.

Granted, I'd be ticked off if a group of guys forced their way into my apartment. But at the same time, I'd be pretty mad, too, if the courts made a ruling, I did my time, yet was still scrutinized for my actions in an incident that occurred more than a year ago.

Sure, the players made mistakes, but we all do, and we pay the consequences.

Both Judicial Affairs and the State College judicial system levied their punishments. The punishments, whether or not considered fair in the court of public opinion, were considered fair in the court of law, which is the only court that counts.

Then Joe Paterno ordered the players to help build houses for Habitat for Humanity and help clean the stadium the morning after games. And before you laugh off cleaning the stadium, I'm sure all 40,000 students would just love to crawl out of their warm beds at 7 a.m. every Sunday and pick up trash in a freezing stadium.

But the pièce de résistance was ESPN's Outside the Lines piece in late July. I'm sure a lot of you have seen the report, but if you haven't, it contained most of the same content published in papers at the time of the fights.

Granted, Paterno did not come across well, constantly referring to a "witch hunt." But his tone and answers during media day two weeks later conveyed a much more responsible and benevolent coach.

"I can't walk away from the fact that we had some kids that were wrong and that maybe I didn't do the best job I could have in the thing," Paterno said at media day. "I tried it. I kept kids home. I tried to do some things that would make them realize they had some responsibility to the community, responsibility to each other.

"The thing that bothered me the most about the incident, that was the most prominent, was the fact that nobody said, 'Hey, this is ridiculous. Let's get out of here.' That's the only thing I feel bad about."

He admitted some of the players had trouble dealing with their new-found fame, but added he has addressed the issue many times and made sure the current players know what is expected of them when

they don the blue and white uniforms.

"We've got to stay on top of things," Paterno said. "I just think it's got to be a question of who you are, what you stand for.

"If you want to walk out of that tunnel and have people cheer for and you want people to respect you and so forth, there's an obligation that goes with that."

And as long as the players understand Paterno's message, they, and the rest of us, can just worry about the locker room instead of the court room.