How could I say this? Isn’t it time for the “healing” to begin? What better way to heal than to cheer the old team on to victory, right? Wrong. We are not yet remotely at the healing stage. That makes the playing of a football game not purgative but grotesque in the current context. To engage in those rituals at this time—rituals I love, by the way, and have participated in since I was about 8 years old and hope to participate in until I draw my last breath—is not to heal. It’s to forget; to force the horror into the background, to bury it in pageantry and team colors and marching bands and tailgate parties and boozed-up alumni taking comfort in ritual. There will be a time for that comfort and those rituals. But the Penn State board should not be permitting them just yet.

What the board should be doing right now is trying to send the message that what happened is utterly and wholly and universally intolerable. There might be various ways to do it. But there’s really only one that will hurt, that will fully and truly drive the point home. Does Penn State want to be one more ass-covering institution in a world of ass-covering institutions? Or does it want to say—as it has often said during the Paterno era—no; we are different. We are Penn State. That’s their chant, by the way. We are [clap, clap] PENN STATE! They should be the Penn State they have claimed to be. Cancel the season.