It was 1969.

Bob Stoops was playing sandlot football in Ohio and Mike Gundy was just getting out of diapers.

Richard Nixon declared Texas a national champion, causing Joe Paterno to have a “BCS controversy” before there was ever a BCS.

UT beat Arkansas in the “Game of the Century,” went on to beat Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl and JoePa was left with an unbeaten season, a Lambert Trophy given to the best team in the east, and a No. 2 ranking.

That’s perspective on how long the legendary Penn State coach has impacted his game. And regardless of the incredible wrongs of an alleged sex scandal, this is a sad way for him to leave this earth.

Hearing of Paterno’s passing 11 weeks after his exit from the college football stage isn’t surprising. Just like Bear Bryant, whose own legendary record he passed on the way to becoming college football’s all-time winningest coach, JoePa didn’t last long after leaving his work behind.

The difference? While the health of both were in question, Bryant left on his own accord. Paterno was forced out, his legacy tarnished by a former assistant coach he considered a friend and his eventual successor, a trail of scarred men and boys trailing him and dare I say, haunting him.

You hear about it all the time, particularly with men, people dying shortly after retiring. Paterno had cancer, but without the role he’d fulfilled for an incredible seven decades, the loss of identity and purpose can be stressful, making retirement not just painful but lethal.

Any doctor will tell you how a happy, positive outlook is helpful for cancer patients. With all that’s happened in Paterno’s life since allegations surfaced that former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky molested numerous young men over a significant period of time, about the only positives have been a supportive family and a groundswell of somewhat empathetic Penn State fans.

But those fans are matched by some who decry how Paterno never pushed for action after passing on a report from a graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, who says he saw Sandusky and one young boy in a shower area.

Paterno was intent on leaving the business on his own terms, perhaps in a casket. The fallout of the scandal took those terms away from him.

I re-read Paterno’s interview with the Washington Post, done after his dismissal, about why he waited a day to notify school officials and chose never to report the incident to police.

“You know, (McQueary) didn’t want to get specific,” Paterno said in the Post interview. “And to be frank with you I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”

What I see in that excerpt is a man struggling to speak. What I don’t know is whether he was struggling to hide the truth or struggling with his own emotions. I can’t answer for Joe but I have recollections of conversations I’ve had over the years with my grandmother, now 90, on “family secrets.” She often told me how in those days, certain things were kept quiet – a relative’s alcoholism, or adultery, and issues of a sexual nature were part of those hushed topics. “It’s just the way it was, we lived with it,” she’d say, and it seemed sufficient even if it didn’t clarify.

These days, such issues are regular in media. Not so back then. Paterno died five years younger than my grandmother. They’d come closer to relating to one another than with me.

But we could collectively agree that truth has never changed, even as the handling of truth has. And there is freedom in the unleashing of the truth. The sooner, the better.

I have to believe the truth ate at JoePa as well as the second-guessing, beyond the point when any denial wouldn’t ever be sufficient. He certainly felt its impact, and seemingly through the Post, in his own way, tried to reconcile the truth, but at the same time, from that generational perspective, perhaps hoping it would just go away.

It wouldn’t, but he did. And that’s tragic, to a point of dying amid dishonor.

Paterno’s coaching legacy, though soiled, lives on positively through the countless lives of players he touched. That’s a certainty.

Perhaps another part of his legacy will remind the rest of us of how taking care of the little things, even if they seem irrelevant or confusing at the time, and handling them in a spirit of truth, will always keep us free.

May he, on the other side now, find the peace he lost here along his way.