The thick glasses on Joe Paterno's rather prominent nose might be tinted, but they apparently don't distort his view of reality in terms of his football team.
Another Senior Day at Beaver Stadium is fast approaching, and Saturday's final home game (against Indiana) for Penn State's departing veterans will again prove to be a time for hugs, tears and misty, water-colored memories of the way they were . . . or at least the way they'd like to think they were.
"It's going to mean a lot to me," tight end Andrew Quarless said of the last time he and his fellow seniors will run out of the tunnel for an afternoon of football before the standard adoring turnout of 105,000-plus. "My time here just flew by. It felt like it was just yesterday when I started."
But with reminiscences come recriminations, and for this bunch of exiting Nittany Lions, there are more than a few. Twice this season, they and their teammates burst out of the Beaver Stadium tunnel favored in defining Big Ten Conference games, and twice they returned, chastened, after losses to Iowa and, last week, Ohio State.
For middle linebacker Josh Hull, the former walk-on who joined the team in 2005, when Penn State bounced back from a period in which it had four losing seasons in 5 years to go 11-1 and win the Orange Bowl, this fond farewell will always be more about what might have been instead of what was.
"Coming into this season, myself as well as the rest of the leaders on this team expected to play for the national championship," Hull said. "We knew we had the athletes, we knew we had the coaching staff. Everything we needed to play for the national championship, we have here at Penn State."
Given that the Nits were 11-2 in 2008, ranked as high as third in the nation at one time and appeared in the Rose Bowl, it was not an entirely unreasonable belief. But wishing does not, and never has made it so, and the defeats to Iowa and Ohio State illustrated what a number of analysts had believed all along: Penn State would need time to break in a mostly new offensive line, receiving corps and secondary, and its special-teams play also was a question mark whose answer needed to be in the affirmative, something that has yet to happen.
