Joe Paterno is very old.  Eighty years old, to be exact.

However, he has also coached a big-time college football team for over 40 years, a job that is by no means good for your health.  Tennessee’s Phil Fulmer and Notre Dame’s own Charlie Weis are not exactly pictures of health.

It takes a mental toil as well.  John L. Smith succumbed to his voices last year:

Meanwhile, Mike Leach’s delusion-driven success at Texas Tech stems from the fact that he really believes he’s commanding a Spanish galleon in an epic battle against a gigantic talking squid:

Nonetheless, Joe Paterno has soldiered on, redefining the word “spry,” and single-handedly keeping the Transition lenses in business.  People have wondered how he does it, considering most people would at least be retired, if not snuggling dirt by his age.

I think I’ve figured it out.

I was reading the New York Times profile on Paterno, courtesy of the Sunday Morning Quarterback (a man consumed with his own college football mania), when I discovered something fascinating:

“We discovered ‘M*A*S*H,’ ” Sue Paterno said, laughing. “I had heard about it, but I didn’t know what it was about.”

The Paternos had never seen M*A*S*H, a show I’ve seen even though it ceased to exist nearly a decade before I existed.

Once I read that, it all made sense:  Joe and Sue Paterno are trapped in a wrinkle in the space-time continuum, where the laws of relativity have been mutated to the point that time progresses at a rate somewhere between five and ten times slower than our perceived experience.  Joe and Sue Paterno have never seen M*A*S*H before because M*A*S*H did not exist in their reality until this year.

Our reality says that we are living in the year 2007.  However, to the Paternos and their hyper-slow reality, it’s just now reaching 1972.  Even though Joe appears to be 80 years old to all of us, he actually is only 42 years old.

My theory is that back in the 1930’s, a young Joe and Sue Paterno, enjoying a lovely ride through picturesque South Central Pennsylvania, got a wild hair up their collective asses to pay a visit to Gravity Hill, the land where the laws of physics do not apply and anarchy reigns.  There, their car broke down, and being the two young lovebirds that they are, a serious heavy petting session ensued.  Sparks flew, and magic was made.  When they came to, they composed themselves and headed home, completely unaware of the time-space anomaly they had just become.

Joey got an assistant coaching job at State, and the rest is history.  Except the Paternos history is significantly shorter than our own.  To Joe, the football season consists of an intense two-week bender, and the offseason is a long holiday weekend.

We got a brief glimpse into the defiance of nature that is the Paterno’s reality last year, when Joe took a blow directly to the knee from a 200-plus pound pile of muscle in the form of a Wisconsin football player.

Paterno was 79 years old at the time.  To us.  79 year old men do not recover from that type of trauma.  Instead, they spend the rest of their years wheelchair bound and grizzled.  But remember, Paterno is really only 41 years old at that time, so while it was a nasty collision, the middle-aged coach only needed to spend a couple of weeks with a hot water bottle and a couple of phosphates.

The universe’s struggle to reconcile our perception of the injury with Paterno’s perception nearly tore our very existence asunder, but fortunately the only lasting ramification from this violation of the  nature of being was Boise State winning a BCS Bowl.

Still not convinced?  More from the NY Times:

Joe Paterno has seemingly not changed. He lives in the same cozy ranch-style house and, until recently, walked through campus to work. He turns in most nights around 10:30 while watching game film, pencil in hand. He does not have a cellphone, has never sent an e-mail message. He laughed when the N.C.A.A. banned text messaging between coaches and recruits this summer.

Of course he hasn’t changed.  He’s living decades in the past.  Cell phones haven’t been invented yet, and e-mails are a thing of pulp science fiction novels featuring aliens with laser eyes.

It has not always been fun for the Paternos the last few years. There was Sue’s recovery from a broken femur while Penn State endured a 4-7 season in 2004. Then there were two awkward home visits later that fall from the university’s president, athletic director and other high-ranking university officials to try to force Joe to retire.

But there was no give in Paterno, who arrived at State College in 1950 as a 23-year-old assistant coach who made $3,600 a season. Since then he has helped spark Penn State’s growth into world-renowned university with a billion-dollar endowment.

And that was why the home visits to discuss an exit plan for Paterno hurt so much. The Paternos’ influence on the university transcends the athletic department; a library is named after them, and they have endowed numerous academic scholarships.

“My faith never wavered,” Sue Paterno said. “It doesn’t matter who the president is or the administration, no one can hurt my love for Penn State. And I think that’s where he was, too, that we really love this place. When he thinks that it’s better off without him, he’ll get out, he’ll go. Right now he loves it.”

Of course Paterno refuses to retire.  He’s still in the prime of his career.  Sure, he felt a bit older passing the big 4-0, but retirement?  He’s not quite ready to hit the shuffleboard courts yet, thank you very much.

“There’s no way to put a timetable on him,” Penn State’s director of athletic medicine, Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli, said of Paterno. “A guy with his gift and mental alertness and ingenuity, as far as I’m concerned, he can go as long as he wants.”

Even doctors, the highest heralds of facts, science, and reason, are recognizing that the Paternos defy any sort of chronological normalcy.

So what does all of this mean?  Other than the fact that the Paternos have discovered a way to cheat death, it means Joe Paterno will continue coaching Penn State for decades to come, and while we’ll see a wheelchair-bound, IV-infused, senile 115-year old man on the sidelines, a graying Paterno in the autumn of his years will be bounding the sidelines as far as he’s concerned.

So remember, even though you see this Paterno:

To Paterno, he’s this Paterno:

He will one day rule us all.