We all have our own Joe Paterno stories.

We have them because he was such a presence at Penn State for so long and because of his ability to relate to people from all walks of life. Whether you’re a former player whose habits and priorities were shaped by Paterno or someone who merely shook his hand after a game, you are feeling the loss of the longtime coach, who died Sunday at age 85, in your own way today.

Here are two of those stories.

The first came several springs ago, when I arrived at my office to find a voicemail from Paterno asking that I call him. This wasn’t what you would call a routine drill; it hadn’t happened before and it never happened again. I called his secretary and within a few minutes that familiar voice was on the line.

I had written a column about the natural attrition that occurs on a college football team during the offseason, how scholarships tend to open up for a variety of reasons. One of Paterno’s players recently had ended his career because of chronic injuries, another had been removed from the squad for legal troubles.

Paterno was upset. He felt the story insinuated that Penn State was running players off. When I tried to ease the coach’s mind, saying that players left every program every spring, it made things worse.

“We’re not like everybody else!” Paterno said, his voice rising.

We talked a few more minutes and I realized I wouldn’t be able to convince him I meant no harm. I said I appreciated him calling me and voicing his opinion and he said he appreciated that I had a job to do.

A couple of years later, Paterno was sitting with a few reporters in a hotel room on a Friday night before a game at Wisconsin, slowly sipping a glass of bourbon and ice. He wanted to know who had written the story that had upset his wife. His eyes, still piercing behind those thick glasses, fastened upon me.

That morning’s column had been about how Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez had taken on Bret Bielema as his right-hand man for one season, which made for a relatively smooth transition and succession plan. I had suggested that Penn State might benefit from a similar process, that it wouldn’t hurt Paterno, in his early 80s at the time, to pick a successor.

Paterno argued that Penn State didn’t need any advice on coaching transitions.

“We’ve had four head coaches in the last 70 years,” he said.

I knew Paterno liked to test the convictions of young writers, so I held my ground. We went back and forth for a few more minutes before the coach finally waved his hand at me and grinned devilishly.

“Hey — I don’t care,” he said. “I didn’t even read the story. Sue told me about it.”

Everyone at the table, Paterno and myself included, broke into laughter.

I tell these two stories because I think they illustrate an important part of Paterno’s layered personality: You could criticize or even disparage him and he wouldn’t bat an eye. But say something that he took exception to about his team or his school, and look out.

Few people took the “We Are ... Penn State” chant as seriously as the man who inspired a lot of those chants. He was proud of his native Brooklyn, even if his hectic schedule only allowed him a few visits back there during the last few decades of his life. He was proud of his Brown University education, and loved reminding his Penn State players that he still owned the school’s career record for interceptions.

But with the exception of his family, there was nothing Paterno took more pride in than his university, his program and his team. In fact, it would not be much of a stretch to say he viewed them as an extension of his family.

Say what you want about Paterno’s coaching or recruiting strategies, about the way he disciplined his players, about whether or not he held on too long. What you can’t say is that he didn’t believe deeply in what he viewed as his job — not just coaching players, but educating young men. It wasn’t enough that they worked hard at practice; they needed to be there — and everywhere else — early. It wasn’t enough that they made clutch plays in big games; he judged them on how they acted after scoring those touchdowns. It wasn’t enough that they made their grades; he wanted them to attend every class.

Paterno believed, as much as anyone else, that the idea of Penn State was bigger than any player or coach or game or team, even bigger than the school itself. That’s why so much of his money went to the school’s library. That’s why there were no names on his players’ jerseys. It’s why he rarely discussed football with recruits, opting instead to talk about their families, classes or other interests. Paterno put off retirement for so long not because he thought he could do the job better than anyone else but because he wanted to continue to be a part of the process that turned so many kids into young men, part of the larger Penn State family.

That’s why the Jerry Sandusky scandal crushed Paterno. He knew that, somehow, the Penn State family had let down the victims. He said he wished he had done more but he was also disappointed that, collectively, his university had not done more. Some people will go to their own graves believing Paterno’s health deteriorated after the board of trustees fired him, that it was the board’s treatment of him that broke his heart.

I believe his heart was broken the week before, when more than a decade of alleged abuse came to light. It violated everything Paterno had worked to build and then to maintain, everything he believed in about his school and the place he lived in and embraced for so long.

Yet it wasn’t a broken heart that killed Paterno. It was cancer, a foe that has taken far too many. Sunday it took a man who meant so much to so many, who was the central character in countless stories. But it didn’t take the idea he had of what Penn State should be. It didn’t take the impact he had on the players he coached or the fans who cheered him or even those who watched quietly from the side with notebooks and tape recorders.

The cancer couldn’t touch the pride Paterno’s players and fans felt for him.

Nor the pride he had always felt for them.

Jeff Rice covers Penn State football for the Centre Daily Times. He can be reached at 231-4609 or jrice@centredaily.com.