Colleges and universities have their own special chants and traditions for sporting events. My late husband John still knew all the cheers from Rutgers, his alma mater. His favorite was “R-U RAH RAH, R-U RAH RAH! HOO RAH, HOO RAH, RUTGERS RAH! Upstream, Red Team; Red Team, Upstream. RAH, RAH, Rutgers, RAH!”

So on my recent trip to Penn State with my brother Fred, sister-in-law Regina, nieces Laura and Claire, nephew and PSU student Andrew, and friends, I was eager to learn about the rituals cherished by the PSU fans during a Big 10 football game.

There is the Nittany Lion, the team mascot, who does one-armed pushups after every touchdown. Impressive. The Lion is also tossed into the air after a score. There's the Big Blue Band, the cheerleaders, the Lionettes, and the incredible fans packed into Beaver Stadium.

In the stadium there is a huge Student Section, including the S Zone in the end zone, where students are given specially colored t-shirts that can be seen throughout the stadium. For the homecoming game, they wore pink and black, Penn State's original colors. These kids stand and cheer for the whole game.

Then there are the chants, the most famous of which is the call-and-response “We Are…Penn State” which is repeated three or four times until the first side calls “Thank You!” and the second side responds, “You're Welcome!” To hear this chant screamed by over 100,000 fans is not only moving, it can be ear-splitting.

This chant originated in a remarkable way, according to a wonderful 30 for 30 ESPN short entitled “We Are” and available athttps://www.espn.com/video/clip/_/id/15695869.

Sculptor Jonathan Cramer, a PSU alum, won a competition to create a piece to help the University heal from the scandal that enveloped it in 2011. During his research he discovered that Penn State put two black players on the team in the years after WWII. One was Wally Triplett, who had originally been recruited by the University of Miami. Of course, when Wally informed Miami that he was black, they rescinded their offer, and Wally was offered a place on the team at Penn State. He was one of two black players on the 1946 PSU football team, and near the end of the season, they had a game scheduled at Miami. Miami informed PSU that the only way they could play them was if PSU left its two black players behind.

So on this campus in western Pennsylvania in 1946, long before the anti-segregation movement began down South, the PSU football players got together to discuss the situation and decide what to do. Should they leave their two black players behind or boycott the game? The team captain looked around the room and said, “We are Penn State…it's all or none,” and called for and got a unanimous vote in support of the boycott. The courage and basic human decency of that proud moment in Penn State history led to “We Are…Penn State” chant that still rings through Happy Valley today.

Cramer's WE ARE sculpture stands on the Penn State campus today, a reminder of the best of Penn State's traditions.