It was a scene usually reserved for the death of rock stars or heads of state. Hundreds of people were there, some with tears in their eyes, many shivering in the low-20s cold. Some laid bouquets of flowers and handwritten notes of appreciation at the base of a statue just outside Beaver Stadium. Others held lit candles in remembrance.

Joe Paterno, iconic longtime former football coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions, was 85 when he passed away Sunday morning at the Mount Nittany Medical Center from complications of lung cancer. And so the mourners came, from as far away as California and Georgia, to pay tribute to a man who had meant so much to all of them.

For this day, at least, and perhaps for many more to come, the bronze likeness of the winningest football coach in Division I history was transformed into Strawberry Fields, Graceland, the Capitol Rotunda.

Tom Bradley, for 33 years a Paterno assistant and the interim coach for four games after Paterno shockingly was fired by Penn State’s Board of Trustees on Nov. 9 in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal, spoke for many when he said that JoePa “will go down in history as one of the greatest men, who maybe most of you know as a great football coach.”

It is remarkable how something as inevitable as death can have such a transformative effect on the living. Was it only 2 months ago that Paterno was judged to be guilty of some level of moral turpitude by those who took a different view of his perceived involvement in the Sandusky scandal?

Criticized for group inertia in the two years since the state Attorney General’s Office began to investigate Sandusky’s alleged involvement with underage boys the 32-member board of trustees became galvanized. Within days, they had fired not only Paterno but president Graham Spanier, forced executive vice president Gary Schultz into retirement and placed athletic director Tim Curley on leave.

Some who had previously derided Penn State’s “success with honor” mantra as sanctimonious and self-serving, with Paterno at the forefront of the holier-than-thou facade, were quick to depict him as a Sandusky enabler.

But, perhaps not unexpectedly, the fight for the hearts and minds of the Nittany Nation began to noticeably shift toward those in the pro-Paterno camp. Whatever suspicions there were about what he might have known about Sandusky were outweighed by mounds of evidence of his good and charitable deeds, from the high graduation rates and unshakable devotion of his players to the nearly $4 million he contributed to the school to which he had become instantly identifiable.

So what will people remember most of Joe Paterno? Will it be his 409-136-3 record? His five undefeated teams? His five National Coach of the Year Awards? Or will it be the lingering stench of the Sandusky scandal? Maybe the person most qualified to summarize the essence of Joe Paterno is, well, Joe Paterno.

“I think if it’s just a question of winning and losing, football is a silly game,” he said a few years ago. “Football, to me, has been a vehicle by which I can have some impact on young people during a very impressionable part of their lives. I take that responsibility very seriously. If we, as coaches, can make a positive impact on kids and win some games, too, so much the better.”