UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- 158 hours until kickoff (and who is thinking about kickoff?)

When the storm of energy first gathers, Happy Valley is too dark to notice. It's 4:45 a.m., a Sunday morning. Penn State defensive coordinator Tom Bradley unlocks the doors to Penn State's football complex, all glass and windows and, at this hour, all darkness and emptiness. He exercises first on the downstairs elliptical machine and then brews some coffee, a vanilla blend. He'll drink two tall cups by sunrise.

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At this hour, one man, perhaps only one man, is already thinking about kickoff. Maybe four people in town are awake, and three of them are parked in front of the 24-hour Wal-Mart. Over the next days, as the countdown to tomorrow's Penn State-Ohio State under-the-lights supernova speeds toward zero, State College will become a nonstop carnival where students in little red hatchbacks cruise down College Avenue with megaphones screaming, "We are!" And the bustling window-shoppers dutifully pause their shopping and respond, "Penn State."

But for now, the frenzy consumes only Bradley. Saturday, he had coached a football game -- a 44-14 Nittany Lions win against Minnesota. He met up afterward with a few buddies downtown, but already, and with frightening purpose, Bradley was thinking about the Buckeyes and the sleep he wouldn't get because of them.

"It's funny," Bradley tells a half-awake visitor, "because you try to enjoy the win, but right away, even walking back from the game last night, I'm already thinking, 'What do we do about [Ohio State wideout Ted] Ginn?' "

Perhaps because he knows these early morning hours intimately, Bradley, reclining in his office chair, looks fresh. His hair, still wet, is combed backward, and his eyes are sharp, not red. He leans forward, aiming a television remote at his office VCR. Bradley rewinds -- once, then twice, then three times -- to footage from a play Saturday afternoon. Against the Golden Gophers, his defense took the field for 60 plays; only one of them could be classified as patently bothersome -- a 48-yard Minnesota touchdown pass just before halftime -- but that's the one on which Bradley focuses.

"Oh yikes," he says, his voice quiet with a gasp of revelation. "Ah ah ah. Max protection."

He rewinds again, watching the play at full speed. Minnesota quarterback Bryan Cupito takes the snap in two-tight end formation, rolls to his right, feigning an option with his tailback. It's a third-and-1 play. "We're in a zone blitz here," Bradley explains, "but we couldn't get there because they max-protected. We were guessing run, not pass. This is only a two-man route here."

Bradley watches 6-foot-5 Minnesota wideout Ernie Wheelwright bolt downfield, covered in the zone defense by Anwar Phillips -- with no safety help. The Penn State cornerback keeps up with him for the first 15 yards, but after that, he forfeits positioning, failing to keep his body angled in front of Wheelwright.

Before the Lions had faced Minnesota, Bradley compiled a notebook of every play the Gophers ran previously in that two tight-end, two-wideout formation. But until the Penn State game, the Gophers never used that touchdown play. So why? It's the perilous guesswork of prediction that prompts assistant coaches like Bradley to burn their sleep hours.

Even when Bradley watches film of Ohio State later on this particular afternoon, most of what he learns -- this mini-procession of detailed revelation -- will never be put to use. Still, the chance opportunity to discover something useful, something game-changing, drives this inefficient coach-vs.-coach mind game, and it explains perfectly why Bradley is preparing for Penn State's most important game of the 21st century by sipping his coffee, skipping church and flipping through game film like it's a bible of coded information.

"You're always running scared," Bradley says. "It's like, 'I know if I look at that [tape] just one more time, I'll see something.' You push yourself. You worry about it.

"Like this play with Anwar. I'm sure Ohio State is looking at that."

107 hours until kickoff (and everybody's awake now)

Penn State, during game weeks, allows its players to communicate with the media only through teleconferences, so the players dial a number, same as the media members, and what follows is a predictable go-round of canned questions and canned answers. But now, for the first time in years, Penn State's football has given its town -- and its follower's -- a jolt of irresistible energy. The talk, on this Tuesday morning, is emphatic.

"Everything about this game is huge," says tailback Tony Hunt.

In 2003 and '04, the Lions generated only seven combined wins. But now, years of unreleased anticipation has found an outlet.

The Lions are 5-0, ranked 16th, and the Buckeyes are 3-1, ranked sixth. Penn State fans, entering the season, had converted to pessimism, but all the while, they only needed one reason to jump back to their sunny equilibriums. So, after four wins to start the year, Penn State thrashed Minnesota -- a 30-point victory that inspired a recent high-water mark for excitement. And by the following evening, students were setting up tents outside Beaver Stadium, lining up for front-row seats and glowing with excitement under the shadow of concrete walls.

Joe Paterno tells his team to approach this game the same as the rest, but the scope of this contest -- a 7:45 p.m. kickoff, with the ESPN GameDay crew traveling into town -- counteracts the coach's hopes. The players are already agog.

"It's definitely unlike any game I've been a part of since I've been on campus," guard Charles Rush says.

"This is a huge game for our team," safety Chris Harrell says. "It will show everybody where we rank."

By Tuesday, more than 530 press passes are issued for the game -- already 100 more than usual -- and players happily answer is-Penn-State-for-real questions from reporters in New York City and Chicago. Paterno decides to cancel Wednesday's player-media calls. He's hoping that his players can stop hearing questions about performing in the biggest game of their careers.

76 hours until kickoff (and Nostradamus likes PSU by 16)

A billboard a few miles outside of town tells travelers of the awaiting comforts at Motel 6, which charges, the sign says, $39.99 per night. Only now, a Motel 6 employee named Eric says the rates for the weekend are $140 per evening, minimum two-night stay, and it doesn't really matter anyway because the rooms have been booked for weeks.

"I've talked to the visitors bureau, and for the weekend, there's not a single room left in town," he says.

It's Wednesday, early afternoon, and downtown State College is buzzing with students. Along the line of restaurants and bars and blue-and-white merchandise stores, fragmented conversations about the football team pass along just like the people. The State College mayor mentions that every police officer in town will be on duty Saturday night. "Because the later into the evening it goes the more they've all been drinking all day, the drunker they are, the rowdier they are," Bill Welch explains.

The town's favored joints somehow lean toward the most elemental names: The Saloon, The Deli Restaurant, The Tavern. Andy Zangrilli, a 42-year State College resident, owns The Deli, among others, and after sliding into an overstuffed booth during a quiet afternoon, mentions that his business on football weekends dropped 15 percent in recent seasons.

"After all of those close losses, everyone was so dejected that people wouldn't come downtown after the game. They'd just get in the car and go home."

But no longer. In the Student Book Store, one block away, 2-foot-tall Paterno bobble-heads nod knowingly at passers-by, and inside, two bookstore employees, both PSU juniors, are sharing the kind of conversation that can only be credited to the massive black hole of time and waiting that precedes a big football game.

David Green of Pittsburgh mentions he heard some acclaimed prognosticator on the radio -- a sports-reincarnated Nostradamus -- predict Penn State would win by 16. Yeah, Green said. "This Nostradamus-picking dude is never wrong, supposedly."

"Everyone is jacked now," Green's friend, Mike Burnside, adds after an interruption. "Especially after Minnesota, we know we're the real deal."

Says Green: "People are walking all over town just going crazy. I've never seen it like this before."

"Even this past Saturday," Burnisde says, "I was out and about, especially late night, and by like 3 a.m., everybody was on the streets, just yelling about the football team. That's all everybody has talked about ever since.

"I'm expecting a riot if we win."

70 hours until kickoff (and Wal-Mart is sold out of tents)

Go see the tents, everybody says, and so by nightfall on Wednesday, 75 tents -- and several hundred students -- cram into a far corner outside the stadium; here, there is no question about the magnitude of the game, but there are several comically obvious concerns about the progress of human living standards.

The scene is about what one might expect from an alfresco commune of fanatical students, all of whom are sharing the same close and primitive environment. It's a large-scale Petri dish of blankets, unshowered kids in flip-flops, guys tossing Frisbees, people who might have been attractive days earlier but now don't stand a chance. It's college freedom.

Though these students are allegedly waiting in line, the tents lack single-row form. Though some students swear there's a method for tracking who arrived first, nobody seems to know what it is. "We're out here and we're not even going to the game," one girl explains.

This village of devotees calls itself "Paternoville." A white truck slows to a stop along the Paternoville sidewalk. A man named Clem -- the eponymous owner of a local barbecue joint -- reaches into the flatbed, where he has gathered 50 pounds of pork and bread to feed the villagers.

Another vehicle pulls up, this one a van driven by quarterbacks coach Jay Paterno. As the side door opens, a stream of football players step to the ground, where they are swarmed by the very people waiting to watch them play.

Linebacker Tyrell Sales drifts toward the perimeter of the mob, where he explains to a few listeners that he'd love Saturday's game to end with the stadium goal posts prostrate, hauled out of the stadium. Three blondes interrupt him, asking if he'd pose for a picture, and one walks away with a shamed hush, asking, "Who was that?"

Everybody knows Michael Robinson, the quarterback smiling for photo after photo, often hugging two girls at once. "I just have one rule," Jay Paterno explains. "What happens in Paternoville stays in Paternoville."

Defensive tackle Scott Paxson ambles through the collection of tents, commenting that some are larger than his bedroom. One student, grabbing his cell phone camera, asks Paxson to pose with an aluminum tin filled with grass. The greenery, the student mentions, is Beaver Stadium turf, preserved after the sod's uprooting two weeks ago.

Paxson's cell phone rings, saving him as he struggles to find words for the absurdity. It's tailback Austin Scott.

"Yo," Paxson says in greeting.

"Yo, why don't you come down to the stadium? A lot of people want to hang out with Austin Scott. I'm at the stadium right now hanging out at all of the tents."

"Yeah, there are a lot of people here. Mike-Rob is here, [Paul Posluszny], Levi [Brown]."

"Yeah, there's food and everything. Hurry up, drive over."

When Paxson hangs up, he surveys the campground. He calls it "unreal," this storm of energy. And with that, six or seven campers in a faraway corner shout, impromptu, "We are!" Paxson, standing in a sea of students who have been at this for days, knows the routine by instinct. He raises his enormous right arm to the sky, shakes it twice and says, "Penn State."