With Sandusky scandal, nothing simple at Penn State

• Penn State has won four games in a row
• Sandusky is set to be sentenced Tuesday
• Sandusky and victims are expected to speak at the hearing

Jerry Sandusky's sentencing comes today. The Penn State football team has won four games in a row.

Do they even belong in the same conversation? Well, yes.

Darkness, and light. Pain, and hope. Real life, and a game. The shame of past deeds by men who ought to have known better, and the resolve of youths who wish only to be college kids.

The punishment of the guilty, and the pluck of the innocent.

That is the way it is at Penn State, and the way it must be. An eternity of mixed feelings. It is mandatory to never, ever forget. To always remember the cost of misplaced perspective and distorted priorities. But it is also OK to cheer.

The word on Sandusky will come from the judge in Centre County, where a path has been beaten to the courthouse door by the world's media. One of the symbols of this ordeal has become satellite trucks.

For a few hours, the anguish of children will be fresh again. The inexplicable and inexcusable horror of it all. Presumably he will be put away for the rest of his days, not that that will fix everything. He will not be the only one paying for this all his life. This stays with the victims forever.

The sentencing and reaction come in the morning. In the afternoon, 11 miles down the road, the football team will be getting ready to play Iowa.

Eleven miles down the road, the football team will be getting ready to play Iowa.

The slow leak of transfers has continued. The first two games of the season were painful defeats, and there are many who expected to see the walls cave in.

Instead, each week gets better, and no matter where one stands on the neglect and culpability and accountability of Penn State, it would be wrong not to credit the perseverance of the current Nittany Lions.

"Those things that happened over the summer and in the past are a lot bigger than football,'' Coach Bill O'Brien said after Saturday's win over Northwestern.``These kids are just having fun playing football right now and going to school.''

Which is as it should be.

Many believe this season should never have happened at Penn State. That by playing on, there was a missed chance of atonement, and a debt unpaid. Not that when it comes to collecting, lawyers from hither and yon aren't trying. Same for the NCAA, which delivered crowd-pleasing sanctions with proper fervor, even as it trampled process.

To this day, I wonder that in this first mega-scandal in the social media age, the NCAA did not let the speed of shared public outrage hyperventilate the system. Justice is not supposed to work like Twitter, no matter how ugly the misdeeds. We do not fast track murder trials.

On this uneasy landscape,a scarred team carried on with its season. O'Brien had no page from the coaching manual on what do. The players faced a situation that no one – not one college athlete who ever played – has faced.

They have hung together and survived, and what earthly reason is there not to admire and appreciate that? If the winning keeps up, the short list of national coach-of-the-year candidates should include O'Brien. Who had to overcome more this season then he?

And yet, in this brightening sky, the same enormous cloud is back today. Another item for the scandal timeline. Another reminder of what was once born in the Penn State football program.

Jerry Sandusky will stand in judgment, but there are others to be judged, too. By a court, by the public, by time. Former university administrators Gary Schultz and Tim Curley go on trial early next year on charges of lying to a grand jury. The ripples will stretch to the horizon.

But none of the accused currently play football. As an institution, Penn State has a long-term assignment of showing it understands where football should fit. All the players can do is try to overcome the shadows of the past they had no hand in making. Which they are, largely by hanging together and not giving in.

So a program that once abetted some of the worst imaginable traits of a man's nature, now displays some of the best. Why not applaud?

But still, a man must be sentenced today for sexually assaulting children, because he was allowed to do so.

Look one way, honor. Another, disgrace. Nothing is simple in Happy Valley anymore, not even a four-game winning streak.