It hasn’t been the season that Penn State men’s basketball hoped for; they’ll tell you that themselves. After an 8-1 start in non-conference play, the youngest team in college basketball has endured plenty of growing pains in a difficult season, where it seems there’s a new NCAA Tournament team on the other side every few days.

With eight freshmen and an average age of under 19 years old, there have been a lot of moments where the team’s inexperience has shown. On several different occasions, Penn State has fought tooth and nail with teams like Michigan, Michigan State, and Illinois, but was undone late. There have also been games, such as the ones on the road in Bloomington and College Park, where the opponent catches fire, and the team can’t find a way to stop the bleeding.

“We knew it was going to be hard,” Saša Ciani said on Monday about the team’s season. “We have one of the youngest teams in the Power Five. We knew the Big Ten wasn’t going to be easy, but there are still five games left, so I think we can change that a little bit.”

Playing in one of the nation’s premier conferences that consists of multiple top-10 teams and is currently projected to send over half of its 18 members to the Big Dance, Penn State lost its first 10 conference games before knocking off Minnesota at the Bryce Jordan Center on February 1 on a Kayden Mingo game-winning floater for the team’s first win in 34 days.

And while any momentum was stopped by the blowout loss in Ann Arbor a few days later and a heartbreaking game-winner by future NBA lottery pick Alijah Arenas against USC, the Nittany Lions picked up a second win on their West Coast trip, taking down Washington last Wednesday.

Now sitting at 2-13 in conference play, they remain in the Big Ten’s basement, but have a chance at moving up with opportunities to get a few more wins before the Big Ten Tournament in March.

“There’s been a lot of ups and downs,” Ciani said. “But we’re trying to stick together, and I think we have a good relationship in the locker room, so I think we have to stay together until the end.”

The West Coast trip had reasons for optimism, but also displayed the reasons the season has gone the way it has. Despite being double-digit underdogs in Seattle against the Huskies, the Nittany Lions battled to the end with a larger, older team and held them off with a wild final 30 seconds. In the game, they held Washington to 6-for-18 from three and got some clutch plays from Freddie Dilione V and Josh Reed to close it out.

“I thought the Washington game, our guys did some things to give themselves a chance to win, and finished at the end,” said head coach Mike Rhoades. “I thought our defense was very good, I thought it was our best 40-minute game of the year defensively.”

That defensive intensity was sorely missing at times all season, but the struggles retired a few days later in Eugene, as Oregon made a barrage of three-pointers and snuffed out a small comeback effort from Penn State, making seven threes in the second half alone.

“I just thought we allowed a possession here or there to both us too much. You need to move on to the next play,” said Rhodes. “If a play doesn’t go your way, it’s how you respond and how you react.”

Rhoades noted the team’s youth and how they’ll need to learn from situations like these going forward.

“I just think that the hardest thing nowadays for young people is to get through adversity,” he said. “It’s hard for anybody in life, period, but in the scheme of a Big Ten basketball game, those plays add up.”

From the start, this season was about development. With all of this youth in a conference like this, Rhoades and Penn State men’s basketball as a whole are looking to build a foundation going forward, and the best way to do that in a situation like the one it’s currently in is to pick up some late-season wins to give them confidence and gain momentum going forward.

“I think every game has a different learning point for us,” Melih Tunca said. “We’re a young team, and we have to learn from our mistakes.”

That started with the wins over Minnesota and Washington, but the team still has, among its final five games, two matchups against 10-15 Rutgers and a pair of home games against NCAA Tournament hopefuls Ohio State and Iowa. After coming up empty in several upset bids early, it will have a chance to play spoiler ahead of the Big Ten Tournament.

And what Penn State does in the Big Ten Tournament could also give the program some positive momentum. While all 18 teams get in this year, unlike last year, when Penn State missed out, teams at the bottom of the conference standings will look to get to the No. 14 seed, which gets a first-round bye. Rutgers, which is 3-11 in the conference, currently sits in the position. A pair of wins against the Scarlet Knights over the next couple of weeks would do wonders for escaping the first day of the conference tournament.

“Our first approach is to win the last five games or do whatever we can to put the best effort that we can,” said Tunca. “We have eight freshmen, so it’s a young team, and we’re inexperienced, but as I said earlier, it’s always a learning point, and we’ll learn from our mistakes.”