Phil Sheridan: Requiem for the soul of Penn State

When time does what it does, and the full measure is taken, Joe Paterno’s legacy will be a fine and remarkable thing. It will be very close to what the great man hoped and dreamed during his decades as a college professor whose discipline happened to be football. 

Paterno was a winner, on the field and in almost every area that mattered.

He was not perfect, which was true before the terrible Jerry Sandusky story broke. That dreadful scandal may have robbed Paterno of the appropriate end to his coaching career, and almost certainly sped up the end of his life, but it will not ultimately rob him of his reputation. That was built carefully, brick by brick, over decades of hard work, uncommon decency and unyielding integrity. It is a sound structure that was rocked, but not destroyed, by the hurricane that has blown through State College since November.

Death and mercy came to Joseph Vincent Paterno Sunday. Surrounded by his beloved wife Sue and their family, the coach was carried off on the phantom shoulders of the hundreds, even thousands, of young men whose lives he enriched over six decades at Penn State.

Death comes to us all. It is mercy when it eases pain too great to bear. For Paterno, the pain of what transpired over the past few months was surely as great as the cancer that officially claimed him. He is free from that pain now.

There was pain over the loss of his job, of course, and over the inability to leave it on his own terms after such a long and stellar career.

But his deepest pain was for the university to which Paterno devoted his life. To say he was the Nittany Lions football coach would be to say Steve Jobs worked in computers, or that Walt Disney was a cartoonist. The man was larger than the university where he worked, than the sport that he coached.

That was both his greatest achievement and, in the end, part of his downfall. If you appreciated Paterno for assuming his position as a much needed conscience of college sports, and for his singular status as the most important man in Happy Valley, then you had to be disappointed by his failure to meet his own standards when confronted with Sandusky’s heinous alleged behavior.