Despite all the excitement, it’s not going to be an easy year.
For James Franklin it’s something he contemplates as we make our way past Beaver Stadium on a walk across campus earlier this summer. People might buy tickets, there’s little doubt about that – but will they show up?
Franklin quips that someone is always out there to buy a ticket on the secondary market. At least that’s what he’s hoping.
Because as COVID-19 makes a slow resurgence and Penn State welcomes thousands of students back to campus with no real vaccination mandate and seemingly little in the way of an actual plan about what happens next, nothing is for certain. Nothing has ever really been for certain the past year or so. Franklin is hopeful, but much to his chagrin this too is out of his control.
And perhaps you are vaccinated, perhaps you are even excited to get back to normal, but will you sit in a crowd of 107,000 just yet? Time will tell.
Uncertainty is something that could be said for most of a changing State College, a place where stores have closed and high-rise buildings have gone up but have yet to really fill with anything other than student apartments mostly empty commercial space.
In turn, those who have not been to town recently will be surprised by the changes. Penn State AD Sandy Barbour once likened COVID-19’s pending economic impact as Hurricane Katrina, and while College Ave may not be covered with the visceral in the same way as New Orleans, the waters of COVID have yet to recede.
It makes for an odd dynamic as fans and students prepare to return to State College for the first time in a long time. It is a place that they know as a warm, vibrant and booming soul of college memories, and it still might be just that, but it also has new scars.
So State College will welcome people back because it must, and because its survival depends on it. That said, every moment of rebuilding brings with it a moment of reflection and grieving. Over 200 people have died in Centre County of COVID-19 while a number of businesses have seen their doors shut one last time. The excitement of football, the excitement of students returning, it’s all there like it always has been. But there is a tenseness within that — an uncertainty if this return will mean the waters might rise again, if the return is necessary.
Elsewhere it is almost certainly not a mistake that Sue Paterno graces the upcoming cover of the Penn Stater Magazine. She is a bastion of defiance, trudging along because what else is she to do.
It is here where an estuary of emotions will meet in 2021. Amid the hopeful resurgence of State College will come the resurgence of a different emotion. It will be 10 years this season since the Jerry Sandusky scandal rocked State College to its core. Penn State will face Illinois, the last team Paterno ever coached against, just days prior to the 10 year anniversary of that final game. It will face Ohio State in Columbus the day after the actual 10 year anniversary.
So there will be all of that — a rehash of things long since buried underneath the benefit of time and the changing of the guard. Paterno is still a part of State College’s soul, a more vibrant point of contention in some corners than others, but the events of 2011 are indelibly a part of State College’s story now. It is a 29 Neibolt Street of emotions, a house with doors not often opened.
But they will be opened again this year and whatever comes out from behind them is anyone’s guess. The camera trucks will almost certainly return on a quest to find the inevitable impromptu homages to Paterno. All of this mixed within the uncertain future of town that has worked to redefine itself in an uncertain time. The irony: a resurgence of COVID-19 might provide the safety from which State College can ride out the anniversary of that year in relative solitude. The other side ,of course, is the high cost at which that solitude – done without the benefit of tourism and perhaps eventually without students – might come.
On the field Franklin and company will look to reverse the program’s course from an 0-5 start in 2020 to something far more respectable in 2021, all while facing a daunting schedule with a quarterback who has shown flashes of both his best and his worst.
When it’s all said and done there is, in fact, plenty to be excited for. State College needs this moment; there is no way around it. Fans will buy tickets, students will help revitalize downtown and new shops will eventually open up. Things might not be normal yet, but they are needed all the same.
But around the margins there is still some of that pain in a place still picking up the pieces. And 10 years after the last hurricane, and the current one not quite gone, it’s hard to say which wreckage came from which storm.
Perhaps it’s fitting that just weeks before Penn State’s season began a tropical storm rolled through town.
And perhaps its a sign that the sun came out again once it had gone.
