The last time the University of Minnesota's athletic bosses hired a women's basketball coach, they were investing in hope.
This time, they're working with something much closer to certainty.
Hiring Lindsay Whalen as she completed her playing career with the Lynx was a unique and attractive set of circumstances. It was worth a try, to see if she could transition quickly into coaching and recruiting.
She managed the latter, if not the former.
Now the Gophers women's basketball program might have the best of both worlds — Whalen's recruited talent, and a coach with a résumé so ideal for Minnesota that if she didn't exist, the Gophers might have invented her.
Dawn Plitzuweit can coach. She took South Dakota to the Sweet 16. She took West Virginia to the NCAA tournament in her first and only season with the Mountaineers.
She has recruited Minnesota and what Minnesotans consider the "other'' parts of the Midwest. Whalen is known to think highly of her.
After years of a slow building of talent and expectations, Plitzuweit's arrival means that the program's long-anticipated future is finally imminent.