"I remember the atmosphere just being pins and needles, like, this is going to be a showdown. On the bus ride over to the stadium, everything was just amplified. There were people all the way throughout. People had started showing up on campus like Wednesday or Thursday. That whole leadup, and then once you got there—the lights on at night, walking out the tunnel, everybody had been waiting all day for it. It was loud. You had a little mist in the air. It was like, you can’t write a script better than this. This is what you came to play college football for. Me, Jordan [Norwood], Derrick [Williams], and Justin [King] were freshmen, so we just didn’t know what we didn’t know. To us, it’s another game. It’s going to be live. They’re good, we’re good. Let’s see how it is. I don’t think it was a secret that in big games like that, Joe [Paterno] kind of played it close to the vest. We weren’t gonna beat ourselves. We could lean on our defense, make plays, move the chains, lean on Mike [Robinson] and our running game. After [the Lions’ 17-10 win], in the locker room, everybody was excited. There were two things there. One, you had a senior class that had been through a lot of turmoil. You had those guys who had been through so much who could celebrate a win like this and enjoy that moment, understanding how important it was. For the rest of the team, it was like, big-game craziness—‘I love it here.’ The next few years, you’d hear guys who were recruits that night talking about that game, and they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s what sold me on it.’ It sold me, too, and I was already here.” 

Deon Butler ’08 Lib was a freshman All-American in 2005 and played for four seasons in the NFL. He lives in Alpharetta, Ga., and is a network security engineer for Cox Communications.