It felt as if all the tailgaters had been here since the last Penn State home game, against Nebraska in November 2011. They drank and ate and played cornhole (snicker snicker), and their children ran around without any visible fear of anyone coming and, you know, doing bad things to them. It looked like all the other tailgate festivals going on in all the major college towns that day, in Lincoln and Stillwater and elsewhere. There was nothing special about it unless you were a Penn State fan, in which case it was all very special because it was yours.

The only visible difference at this tailgate was the slogans. I saw so many slogans that I wished everyone at Penn State had sat down on Friday prior to gametime and settled on just one. But they didn’t, and this was the resulting word soup:

"Penn State Forever" "Joe Knows Football" "We Are" "We Care" "Those who stayed may not be champions, but they will forever be legends." (I thought this one was the stupidest of the bunch.) "Roll up your pant legs. This is JoePa’s house." "Still Proud" "Success with honor" "Coach Paterno, only one thing: Thank you!" "NCAA" (with a hammer & sickle replacing the C) "Restore the roar" "Hey media... we know the truth" (Somehow I doubt that Bobby from Delta Upsilon knew more about the Sandusky case than Sara Ganim) "O’Brien’s Lions" "We Are... Pissed Off" (It’s worth noting that no one who rocked this slogan looked all that pissed off) "More than a man, more than a coach, you touched our soul" "One Team" "Those people" (???) "Billieve" (referring to PSU head coach Bill O’Brien) "We are... because he was"

The one I saw the most often was a simple shirt that read "HAPPY VALLEY," a shirt they were selling in all the bookstores and at the Museum Shop at the stadium. I liked that slogan the most. If I was a drunken Penn Stater, that’s the one I would have chosen. Everyone walking by flashed peace signs to one another, just to reinforce how happy they were to be in this valley.

I found my tailgate party and drank as much Coors Light as I possibly could, while playing Once Around with my companions (you pass the ball around in a circle and if you drop it, you be drinkin’). Overhead, a Cessna flew fly by dragging a banner that read "OUST ERICKSON / TRUSTEES," in reference to new school president Rodney Erickson and the board of trustees, who allowed the NCAA to bring down the hammer on Penn State football. Few people on the ground seemed to notice or care.

An hour before gametime, I staggered back to the stadium looking for the site where Paterno’s statue once stood. On my quest, I passed by a barn on the edge of the stadium grounds that looked like someone built it there on purpose, to emphasize the bucolic surroundings. I asked eight different cops for directions to the statue site and they gave me eight different replies, one of which I’m certain was deliberately intended to throw me off. I felt creepy asking where it was again and again, because it was an admission to people that I wasn’t from here. And if I’m not from here, well then why am I snooping around for JoePa? I was essentially labeling myself a tourist of death. Before I could find the right spot, the game was about to begin. JoePa would have to wait.

Beaver Stadium was at nearly full capacity on Saturday, with a handful of empty seats at the top in the corners of the stadium. I sat alone in WB section (one half of stadium’s sections start with W, the other half start with E. W-E, get it?). There was a squat, older woman in the seat in front of me. Not in it, actually. On it. For the duration of pregame, the woman stood on her bench screaming "WE ARE." At Beaver Stadium, there’s not a lot of space between rows, so when I was standing as well, this woman’s ass was less than a millimeter from my sweaty, meaty hands. I had to lean back just to make sure I didn’t graze her ass, or give it a full-fledged bump. This was not a day for inappropriate touching.