Much of my frustration with being a Penn State fan is a correlation of Penn State’s performance in my lifetime.
Good but never as great as the people older than me got to see.
I had to see the idea written in two places before it finally clicked earlier this morning.
“Generations of fans in their 30s and younger have wondered what something like this postseason run might look and feel like. Fans of all ages have followed along.”
That line is originally from The Athletic’s Audrey Snyder in a brilliantly written piece after Penn State’s Fiesta Bowl win. I saw it again when former State College resident and current college football writer Michael Weinreb highlighted the article in a well-written newsletter.
It’s true.
It’s not your fault but my generation has been excluded from the stories you, anyone born before 1975 or so, got to live. My generation didn’t get to know what Penn State-Notre Dame in the 80s felt like. My generation has not gotten to feel what a national championship might feel like.
Yet we’ve been so bitten by nostalgia from our parents’ generation that in some ways it’s jaded my own fandom to become the part that makes my hair out the most. Being a Penn State fan has been, in some ways, this arduous search for yesteryear. It’s a cornerstone of this fanbase – and probably any other. It’s how tradition grows and there’s nothing wrong with it to a point. It’s also, in other ways, held this program back. If you’ve followed this football team since the early 2000s, I don’t have to explain what I mean but you know very well what I’m talking about.
But we, my generation, have been chasing nostalgia in an unsubstantiated way that when I saw that line twice, it gave me an awakening.
For the first time as a Penn State fan, I’m experiencing what it’s like to truly chase nostalgia as little bits of it pop up all over the place with Penn State’s Orange Bowl berth against Notre Dame.
I’ve had to sit around and listen to a lot of you talk about yesteryear, and even if Tony Soprano said “‘remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation,” it’s my turn.
Jan. 3, 2006, I had a hockey game in Johnstown.
But I remember seeing the opening on a giant Zenith black TV shoddily hung on a wall of the War Memorial.
My game was over as the game kicked off, and we rushed home, listening to Steve Jones and Jack Ham call the game.
It was the night of the Orange Bowl between Penn State and Florida State, and I had school the next day.
It took three overtimes to solve Florida State – and Penn State’s own kicking game. But Kevin Kelly, Michael Robinson and the whole rest of the Penn State football team that galvanized my fandom eventually figured it out.
All well past my 10:30 p.m. school-night bedtime.
The first time you get to stay up past your bedtime is the first sense of freedom I think you really get to feel as a child. It’s a little rebellious when you do it at a friend’s house but there’s something even greater about it when your own parent lets you do it.
You’re openly committing this most defiant act not just in the face of but with permission from the person who set the very rule.
I went to school the next day. I talked about that game with my friends. It was a celebratory moment – not just that Penn State had won – but that Penn State gave us a chance to stay up late on a school night.
That 2005 team and that 2006 Orange Bowl were on my mind when Penn State won the Fiesta Bowl because this team reminds me a lot of that team. This is a uniquely memorable year for Penn State football just like that team was.
When Notre Dame beat Georgia in the Sugar Bowl on Thursday, it brought back a lot of memories for people about the matchups of Penn State and Notre Dame in the 1980s but it’s hard to contextualize them for my generation when we didn’t get to live them.
What we do however have is the Jimmy Clausen game.
The second the Sugar Bowl ended yesterday, I rushed for the remote so that I could show Anna, my wife who wasn’t a big Penn State fan back in 2007, what the game featuring the most-hyped quarterback in Notre Dame history (to that point) was all about.
The promise he offered that he would be the quarterback to return Notre Dame back to its glorious land. The promise around the crowd, for the first time asked to all wear white, descending on and for him. The hype around the fact this was the last time Penn State and Notre Dame might ever meet in the regular season. It all made that game – in my childhood – one of the biggest that I can truly remember a buzz around going into the game, not just after.
As she rolled her eyes at me and returned her focus to her phone, I grabbed Anna’s attention once more to make her watch the Derrick Williams punt return. The play itself is memorable. He picks up the ball off the ground. He zigs and zags across the grass of Beaver Stadium. But it’s the celebration that I’d emulate in any pickup game of football when I scored a touchdown – because I thought that football game had the same magnitude – that is the lasting moment for me.
The outstretched arms, embracing the crowd, the crowd embracing him back.
For how we iconize football players, this was my Superman and Hercules and that moment was his statue.
This morning, a clip of that play came up on my phone from that week’s “Penn State Football Story” with Guy Junker’s narration. It’d been a while since I had heard that voice describing my team’s play in the dramatic cinematic style akin to NFL Films.
And it reminded me that was the highest – and really all the higher – the in-the-moment nostalgia has ever been in my lifetime.
The only other example is 2016 and I will argue that the day of the Big Ten Championship is one of the best days of my life.
But I’ve also become somewhat spurned by the fact it’s now eight years later and we’re still watching – and we’re still enamored by – the blocked field goal against Ohio State to send Penn State to that championship.
The clip is wheeled out on social media time and time and time and time and time and time again. There’s nothing wrong with it per se. It’s the favorite play of some kid who is probably about 15 right now — just like the Williams punt was for me.
It’s also a reminder there hasn’t been a moment since then that’s equaled it – or supplanted it.
Ever since it happened, I feel like this fanbase has been chasing something even bigger, but we’ve used that clip and that play like a safety blanket because since 2007 and the Jimmy Clausen game there haven’t been as many moments like it.
Now, though, we’re not just chasing it. We’re experiencing it.
Penn State is two wins away from a national championship. Penn State is playing in a national semifinal – the very thing that since 2016 we’ve all wanted to see them get a crack at.
Right now, we are in the midst of the nostalgia.
None of us know what Thursday’s Orange Bowl will be like. Whether or not some kid will get to stay up after his bed time – whether Tyler Warren will electrify us with some big play the way Derrick Williams did that will then be emulated in backyard football games – all remains to be played out in the drama that is college football.
But we, like Snyder and Weinreb pointed out, no longer have to wonder what all of that might feel like. We’ll get to see it.
We’ll get to experience it – in the now.
Be sure to read Audrey’s piece here if you haven’t yet and Michael’s piece here.
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