Penn State's Joe Paterno, USC's Pete Carroll share a zest for the game

Pete Carroll is leaving the practice field wearing a gray sweatshirt, khakis, athletic shoes.

Joe Paterno is headed to the practice field wearing a gray sweatshirt, khakis, athletic shoes.

One difference. The cuffs.

True to his legend, even on a stroll through a hotel lobby when next to nobody is watching, Paterno's cuffs are rolled up above his shoes, the quintessential 1920s hipster.

Says Carroll: "I love those cuffs, I really love them. I roll my pants up sometimes for the team, we all have fun with it. It's a classic, Joe is a classic, those cuffs are the greatest."

Says Paterno: "He loves my what?"

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Pete Carroll is talking in quick, cool bursts.

"Joe is remarkable, simply remarkable. To be that tough for so long, to endure so much, to stay in one place and keep winning, he's a once-in-a-lifetime coach."

Joe Paterno is talking in quick, antique bursts.

"Pete, boy, he's not only a great recruiter, but he knows what do with the players once he gets them. That kid is quite a coach."

That kid is, um, 57 years old.

"At this stage of my life, pretty much everyone is a kid."

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For the guys running the show in today's Rose Bowl, it's more than a football game, it's a fable.

Call it "Coaches in Wonderland."

Or, "Pete Through the Horn-Rimmed Glasses."

On one sideline will be perhaps the best college football coach of our generation.

Looking down from the clouds -- OK, the press box -- will be perhaps the best college football coach in history.

Maybe it's more than a fable, maybe it's a movie. Call it, "Oh God, Two!!"

It's Pete Carroll of USC against Joe Paterno of Penn State and, oh yeah, about the movies . . .

During Wednesday's final news conference, Carroll was comparing the eternally young 82-year-old Paterno to the hottest film character in the country, that Brad Pitt-played character who ages in reverse.

Says Carroll: "He might be the living image of Benjamin Button."

Says Paterno: "The living example of whom?"

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Although he may have once celebrated the emergence of talkies, Paterno today explains that he has seen only two movies in the last 40 years -- "E.T." and "Titanic."

"When I saw the Titanic, I felt like I was in the bath," he says.

Naturally, to a guy who has bobbed around for nearly half a century in the shipwreck that is college football, a natural disaster would feel like a warm soak.