Somewhere in between exiting through Gate F and crossing Porter Road into the parking lot adjacent to Medlar Field, the same thought rattled in my brain yet again.
I have turned it into my own personal crutch for coping with just how intensely bizarre this season has been.
Five previous times this season, I’ve reminded myself after the end of a Penn State football game that none of us have to experience each of those individual games again.
But after Saturday, a 27-24 loss to Indiana at the hands of a 10-play, 80-yard drive completed by one of the best catches of the entire college football season, it’s clear that the thought of never experiencing this again, now rattling in my mind as I swerved around foot traffic, doesn’t just apply to individual games. It applies to the whole of the 2025 season.
We don’t have to experience anything like this again because we will never experience anything like this again.
In fandom – like in life – we find ways to cope and to rationalize. We find ways to place blame or sink false answers into something that does not go our way. And ever since Penn State started losing games – particularly after the UCLA loss – there has been an undercurrent of asking how and why.
Why did the preseason No. 2 team in the country lose to Oregon with all of this energy and investment poured into it? How could Penn State lose to UCLA when it’s never lost a game like that? Why did it feel like this program was lost after Northwestern? Why didn’t things end the way they should have against Iowa? Why did it all spiral against Ohio State? And now, why – after the effort that Penn State put together on Saturday – was it not good enough against Indiana?
But at this point, I’m not sure that matters. I’m not sure this will ever matter. Nothing about that quest will satiate why this season has turned into a hellscape that only college football can provide.
The results are, very much, the results for Penn State. And instead of finding ways to blame or even finding ways to find answers, the better route may be to only accept that we do not have to experience this again.
There will not be another Penn State football season in which the offseason expectations that began in the hours after Notre Dame kept its season alive in the Orange Bowl mushroomed into an avalanche of ardent belief that 2025 would be different. There will not be another Penn State football season where the head coach of 12 years gets fired for losing three straight games because of all of the expectations blowing up right in front of his and 107,000 faces. There will not be another Penn State football season where halfway through the season, we will spend time grappling with what could have been in a massive game of “what if” that will never has substantial answers.
That is not to say that Penn State should quit playing the games, should turn off the TV and stop showing up. (None of which Penn State and its fans did on Saturday.) That also isn’t to say that future Penn State football seasons won’t hold some twists and turns that won’t be enjoyable either. Rather accepting that we don’t have to live through this again is the acceptance that time is linear.
It can’t go back. It can only go forward. We do not have to live through this experience of a hellish landscape at rock bottom, known as the 2025 Penn State Football Season, ever again.
When did Penn State arrive at this rock bottom? I’m not exactly sure and like those other lingering questions, we will never find the answers.
So there is very little value in searching for them.
Instead, there is only embracing that, for as painfully heartbreaking as this season in which so many believe it would be different positively, this season will be thrown into the history books for very different reasons. There’s nothing that can be done to undo that either.
Not even the moments of Saturday’s loss could change that – even when it felt like they could.
Saturday felt like Penn State not just wanted, not just needed but deserved a win. Terry Smith – leading his alma mater onto the field for the first time at home – deserved it for what he’s given to Penn State. Nicholas Singleton – who finally put together a 143-yard performance that many thought he’d do time and time again this season – deserved it because maybe no one needed it more. The fan base – which could have packed it in just as easily as Penn State’s roster but made a clear impact on Saturday – deserved it because no one wanted it more.
But college football doesn’t care about what you want. It doesn’t care about what you need. It doesn’t care about what you deserve.
It will – as it has now done for the sixth time this season – instead rip your heart out in the form of the back, not the front, foot of Omari Cooper Jr. for no apparent reason other than “damn, that was a nice catch.”
When that happens, you have to cope with it, just like we may have to cope with the fact Penn State never would have achieved what we thought it could this season before it started. With the very few silver linings left out there this season, the most obvious is that Penn State fans, coaches and players never have to experience this season again, even when there are three games remaining on the schedule.
In my search for answers as I walked back down the gravel path to the car for how this season has unfolded, there were none. I’m not going to bother looking for them anymore. Instead, there is a shift embracing that this Penn State football season – like the last six games – is something we never have to experience again.
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