Let the games begin.

NCAA President Mark Emmert, right, gestures during a news conference as Ed Ray, NCAA Executive Committee chair and Oregon State University president, looks on at left. The pair was announcing penalties against Penn State that included a $60 million fine and the loss of all coach Joe Paterno's victories from 1998-2011, in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

With one year of NCAA sanctions against the Penn State football program in the rearview mirror, the pushback officially begins Monday afternoon in the federal courthouse in Harrisburg.

There, a band of lawyers representing Gov. Tom Corbett and, by extension, his constituents, will try to dodge an early punch from the NCAA, which is trying to end this war with a first-round knockout.

The Indianapolis-based association, according to its briefs, will argue that Corbett’s attempt to void all sanctions agreed to by Penn State leaders last summer is an emotional and political play that has no bearing in the law.

“It’s an important day, certainly, because it’s the first time that there will be any indication of what the judge thinks of the case,” said Seattle-based attorney Stephen Morrissey, who settled a class-action complaint against the NCAA several years ago.

But Morrissey cautions that while a defeat of the motion to dismiss would be a good result for Corbett and his allies, it won’t necessarily be a harbinger of who prevails in the case-in-chief.

That’s because the issue for Monday is so limited.

The NCAA is arguing that Corbett has no business intervening in a settled agreement between the association and one of its member schools that, in its view, fits completely within its role of regulating college sports.

“The remedial measures that Penn State agreed to were controversial, and have elicited strong feelings on all sides,” the NCAA lawyers have written in support of their motion to dismiss.

“Some think they are too harsh, and some think they are too lenient. But none of those feelings have anything to do with the (federal) anti-trust laws” the Corbett Administration is arguing have been violated.

Team Corbett will counter that the state does have standing, because the consent decree itself is an egregious violation of anti-trade protections and the result promises harm to a wide variety of Pennsylvanians.

“What is radical is the NCAA’s argument that the governor of a state lacks standing to enjoin an antitrust violation aimed at one of its universities, with direct adverse effects on untold numbers of consumers and other citizens of the state,” the governor’s attorneys assert.

The hearing before U.S. District Judge Yvette Kane will revolve wholly on legal arguments, and will not feature any witness testimony.

Penn State itself is not a party to the suit. In agreeing to the sanctions, President Rodney Erickson waived any claim to further legal action.

But for many Penn State partisans, this is like a prayer answered after nearly a year of what has seemed like top university leadership taking whatever punishment came its way for perceived failings in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.

Late Penn State Coach Joe Paterno's son Jay, for example, lamented in a recent interview with CBS Sports.com that Penn State's leaders never pushed back against insinuations that football controlled all decision-making around the university.

“The disappointing thing is that there was no fight,” Paterno said.

Enter Gov. Tom Corbett.

Launching the case in January, Corbett seeks to have the punishments overturned as a violation of federal anti-trust law that, he says, is causing economic harms to many Pennsylvanians – from the athlete who may lose a scholarship opportunity at Penn State to a middle-income student who may face higher tuition because of the trickle-down effects of the $60 million fine and declining football revenue.

But some Penn Staters don’t hide their frustrations that Corbett didn’t come to these arguments earlier, when –as a board of trustee member - he might have been able to persuade Erickson not to accept the terms.

“Certainly anybody who stands up and defends Penn State deserves some modicum of respect from us because there’s been so little of it,” said Maribeth Schmidt, a spokesman for the alumni reform group Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship.

“But why wasn’t it done sooner?” she asked.

The sanctions were handed down in July, shortly after the release of the Freeh Report commissioned by Penn State's trustees to take an internal look at who may have known what about Sandusky on campus, and what they did about him.

They include a four-year ban on post-season play, a reduction in football scholarships and the fine, to be paid over five years into an endowment established to help prevent child sexual abuse and provide aid to victims and their families.

Based exclusively on Freeh's findings, the NCAA held that the punishments were necessary because of Penn State’s "unprecedented failure of institutional integrity leading to a culture in which a football program was held in higher esteem than the values of the institution, the values of the NCAA, the values of higher education, and most disturbingly the values of human decency.”

Corbett said when he filed his suit that it took him some time to understand how the NCAA actions came outside its normal investigative process, how they harmed the wrong people, and what options he had to fight back.

The good news for Corbett, attorneys familiar with federal civil courts say, is that judges are often reluctant to dismiss cases this early in the process.

The bad news?

The NCAA has a richly-deserved reputation for fighting tooth-and-nail on cases that it has a lot invested in.

“It’s a matter of having the resources, and a matter of seeing challenges like this as questioning what they see as their core mission and ability to make decisions” that stick, said Morrissey, the Seattle attorney.

“And,” he added, “there’s a degree of arrogance with the NCAA, where they don’t like being told they're wrong.”