Joe Paterno, who at Penn State won more games than any other major-college football coach only to have his golden resume tarnished by a child sex-abuse scandal, died yesterday. He was 85.

His death, only 21/2 months after he was both fired by the school and diagnosed with lung cancer, came as an eerie fulfillment to a prophecy he had made often in the final decades of his 61 years in State College, Pa.

When Alabama coach Bear Bryant died of a heart attack in 1983, only 28 days after his 1982 retirement, a shaken Paterno absorbed the lesson.

“What else would I do?” he said when quizzed about retirement. “I don’t want to die. Football keeps me alive.”

While Paterno’s coaching career was marked by its length and successes, the end came suddenly.

“Everything has happened so quickly,” said Dr. Raymond J. Tesner, a Columbus orthopedic surgeon who played linebacker at Penn State in the mid-1970s.

“You go from ‘Is he going to coach another year?’ to ‘Is he going to be forced to retire?’ to ‘he gets fired’ to ‘he gets cancer’ to ‘breaks hip’ to ‘losing hair’ to ‘he dies.’

“My wife and I were at his house two weeks ago, and you knew he was failing, but you didn’t know it would be this quickly. I feel as much as anything he had a broken heart.”

Paterno was a five-time national coach of the year. He had five unbeaten and untied teams, and he coached Penn State to two national championships. He took his Nittany Lions to 37 bowl games, winning 24, and turned out dozens of All-Americans.

Paterno’s record for victories was surpassed by only John Gagliardi, who has won 484 games at Carroll College in Montana and St. John’s of Minnesota, coaching below the major-college level.

But on Saturdays at Beaver Stadium, crowds exceeding 100,000 cheered on Nittany Lions players recruited by Paterno largely from Pennsylvania and nearby states. Many went on to stellar professional careers, among them running backs Franco Harris, Lydell Mitchell and John Cappelletti, who won the Heisman Trophy.

Paterno produced a Penn State following so large and loyal that the football program now regularly produces annual profits exceeding $50 million.

An Ivy League graduate (Brown University) who made his team’s motto “Success with honor,” he graduated an astounding percentage of players, constantly stressed the role of academics in the college athletic experience, operated a program that was never punished by the NCAA and donated a considerable portion of his relatively modest salary to Penn State’s library.

“I think coach Paterno is one of those people who transcended not only football but life,” said Ki-Jana Carter, a Westerville South product who starred at running back for Penn State from 1992-94. “He was a life-skills coach. He was revered and admired by everybody.”

“Coach Paterno was a role model and mentor for every coach in America,” former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel told The Dispatch yesterday.

“No one that I know has made a difference in more lives.”

But a career notable for its integrity and tranquillity ended in an almost unimaginable scandal, with Paterno accused of doing too little to stop a former colleague from surrounding himself with and — if the sordid accusations are true — abusing boys.

On Nov. 9, 2011, just four days after the arrest of Paterno’s longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges, the university’s board of trustees fired Paterno.

Although he had been accused of no crime, the coach was widely condemned by those convinced he had somehow ignored or, worse, covered up crimes against children in order to preserve his program.

But in grand jury testimony and in a Washington Post interview published a week before his death, Paterno insisted he had been unaware of Sandusky’s alleged behavior until 2002. And at that time, as university guidelines required, he notified his superiors.

But Paterno also has called the Sandusky scandal “one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”

Many refuse to let that tarnish their opinion of Paterno.

“Why in the world everybody keeps bringing up all this other stuff, I don’t understand,” former OSU coach John Cooper said yesterday. “Joe Paterno was very saddened by what happened over there, but Joe Paterno didn’t do that. ... We say here (in Columbus) that coach Tressel should have passed the information along that he got (concerning his players receiving improper benefits), that’s all he had to do. Well, that’s what coach Paterno did do, from the way I understand it. He passed along the information after he got it.

“But instead, we’re reading about the scandal and what he didn’t do. Lord have mercy, the man won more games than anybody who ever coached in major-college football, and he did it the right way.”

Paterno’s supporters blame the trustees for his demise and wonder whether his heartbreaking firing somehow hastened his death. They wonder how a coach who had done so much for the school could have been treated so callously, so hastily and so harshly amid the scandal, especially after he already had offered to step down at the end of the 2011 season.

The night of the firing, thousands of Penn State students took to the streets of State College to protest the decision. Last night, thousands more gathered in front of Penn State’s administration building for a candlelight vigil to remember the coach. School officials said they are working on plans to commemorate his life and career.

Paterno’s family, in announcing his death yesterday morning at the Mount Nittany Medical Center, said: “His ambitions were far-reaching, but he never believed he had to leave this Happy Valley to achieve them. He was a man devoted to his family, his university, his players and his community.”

During his 46 years as head coach, Paterno paced the sidelines in his thick tinted glasses and rolled-up baggy khaki pants that revealed white athletic socks. He seemed as much a part of the Penn State landscape as Mount Nittany, overlooking the central Pennsylvania campus known as Happy Valley.

Paterno and his wife, Sue, lived in a simple ranch house in State College. They were major benefactors of Penn State, and during his nearly half-century as head coach, donors gave hundreds of millions of dollars, helping to shape Penn State into a major research institution, seemingly an outgrowth of his making the school a national brand name through its football team.

When Penn State defeated Illinois 10-7 on Oct. 29, the victory was Paterno’s 409th, surpassing Eddie Robinson of Grambling for most career victories among NCAA Division I coaches.

It would be Paterno’s last game.

In death, Paterno received the praise that under normal circumstances might have been reserved for the retirement dinner he never received.

“We have lost a remarkable person and someone who affected the lives of so many people in so many positive ways,” new Ohio State coach Urban Meyer said. “His presence will be dearly missed. His legacy as a coach, as a winner and as a champion will carry on forever.”

In addition to his wife, Paterno is survived by his sons, David, Jay and Scott; his daughters, Diana Giegerich and Mary Kathryn Hort; and many grandchildren. His wife and children all were Penn State grads.

Dispatch reporters Tim May and Bill Rabinowitz, along with The New York Times, contributed to this story.