The Gophers football team lost 19-17 to North Carolina in their season opener, a maddening display of football that still angers a group of friends and fellow Minnesota alums.

Had they made a kick ... or one more play on defense or simply played the game in October instead of August, the Gophers would have won.

It seemed like an ominous start to what would be a forgettable season. Iowa steamrolled Minnesota in the second half of the Big Ten opener. Michigan loomed next, and how were the Gophers supposed to compete?

Except they did, staging a furious comeback against the forward pass-challenged Wolverines, only to be undone by a bogus penalty and rule change that came too late to help them.

It was a devastating enough outcome for the Gophers, then 2-3, that turning this year into anything other than a repeat (or worse) of last year's 5-7 finish seemed like wishful thinking.

Which is why thinking of this season in an entirely new way is both frustrating and enlightening. I went from, "Will they ever win again?" to musing on Wednesday's Daily Delivery podcast with Star Tribune beat writer Randy Johnson that the Gophers were a couple of plays away from being in the College Football Playoff discussion.

Since getting hosed in that Michigan game, the Gophers have won three in a row over USC, UCLA and Maryland to improve to 5-3.

You don't have to squint that much to imagine a scenario in which they were instead 7-1. The North Carolina game was given away. The Michigan game was taken away. And if they were 7-1, the Gophers absolutely would be in the picture for the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff.

Yes, every team can play the "what-if" game. And yes, the Gophers needed late rallies to defeat both USC and UCLA. Those easily could have been losses, and a realist can say most teams will have their dramatic wins and dramatic losses even out over the course of time.

More than anything, this little daydream reinforces how important the expanded playoff is to a school like Minnesota.

The Gophers might have had a team once every generation worthy of trying to land a spot in the old four-team format. The 2019 team, for example, was in that conversation had the end of the Big Ten season concluded differently.

In a field with 12 (or eventually, we imagine, 16) teams? A mid-level program like Minnesota should have a squad capable of busting into that group once every three to five years, and it should actually make it at least once a decade.

This year's Gophers will probably lose again this year — perhaps as soon as Saturday at Illinois against a coach (Bret Bielema) they have never defeated.

But this year could have been even more than what it is. And future years will be.