ASSOCIATED PRESS: Penn State has long cast itself as embodying the highest standards of personal conduct coupled with academic excellence, as captured in its school song: “May no act of ours bring shame to one heart that loves thy name.” And few bled the school’s blue and white colors more than Sandusky, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there and began his Nittany Lions coaching career in 1969. In retirement, Penn State football continued to play a big role in Sandusky’s life; he just wasn’t pacing the sidelines at games. He received celebrity treatment from adoring fans and football faithful at home games, where he watched from a special Beaver Stadium box “almost like being an ambassador to Penn State,” said Richeal, Sandusky’s co-author. It was there in plain sight, prosecutors say, that Sandusky built relationships with the boys he would later attack. It was there that he was still regarded with awe as part of the Penn State family and part of a community that proudly separated itself from the rest of college athletics. Paterno ruled, and preferred handling problems internally. “He was a tougher taskmaster” than others at the university, his wife said. “Anyone who knows Joe knows he doesn’t put up with anything. No one wants to be in Joe’s dog house.”But others saw the coach in a different way, as somehow above the rules that applied to everyone else. Vicky Triponey was Penn State’s standards and conduct officer when she wrote an email about the coach on Aug. 12, 2005, that became a controversy when she released it after Sandusky’s arrest. Her email said Paterno was “insistent he knows best how to discipline his players … and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should NOT be our concern … and I think he was saying we should treat football players different from other students in this regard.” She continued: “Coach Paterno would rather we NOT inform the public when a football player is found responsible for committing a serious violation of the law and/or our student codes, despite any moral or legal obligation to do so.” MORE