Dream on...
I'll be happy to see the Gophers play Penn State.
And of course there Is also the argument that (a) playing Penn State (hopefully, not counting chickens before they hatch in spite of my honest optimism
@iowa) gives us an extra win, which, if nothing else, cements us as the top-team not-in the NCAA playoffs and thus the leading B1G candidate for WNIT tournament; (b) in spite of the potential for being extra tired having to play that first Wed round, maybe we'll be ready-to-game whereas some other teams may have rested too long; (c) it gives us an opportunity to play double-posts essentially all-game (just for the practice) against Penn State - even though we may not need it for them - but it's a remedial chance to give our backup posts (who we'll absolutely need if we aspire to do more than beat just Penn State) some on-court playing experience - which is what we should have been doing against most of the non-conf season teams instead of pretending that we needed to play our starters most of the time (which we needed to do mostly only against Missouri State, Arizona State and maybe Notre Dame).
Perhaps hoping that our backup posts can get sufficiently better (as much as they need to be, anyway) in one game against Penn State (plus the earier Illinois game) is just as much of a "dream on..." pipe dream as hoping to beat Iowa and Maryland. But it's the same dream/different days really, since the true (pipe???) dream here is winning out in the Big-Ten Tournament - which makes us the B1G representative at the NCAA Tournament - and is most likely (and I hope it's not bad luck to say this out loud) the only way we're going Dancing this year.
If we win five straight in Indianapolis, that would be truly impressive and amazing. Anyway, I just want to be optimistic, and look at our final two games (Iowa and Maryland) as don't-care games that are still very necessary in order to figure out how to beat them later on in Indianapolis (after hopefully getting through Michigan somehow).