MADISON, Wis. - Make no mistake: Big Ten season is a long slog every year, but the grind has benefits.

One of them is that, to a well organized team, there’s no time to let tough losses linger. A tough game against your rival might not have gone your way, but if you dwell on the loss for too long you’ll risk playing poorly in your next matchup and risk letting one loss turn in to two.

That’s the silver lining the Wisconsin Badgers (10-4, 2-1 Big Ten) have to hold on to as they try and recover from Thursday’s 59-52 loss to Minnesota, which featured a particularly ugly stretch of offense in the first half that ended up sinking their chances of a comeback. But with just two days in between the loss and their next matchup against Penn State (7-7, 0-3) the Badgers will need to digest what went wrong against the Gophers quickly if they want to bounce back and play well on Sunday night in State College.

“Penn State’s not going to feel sorry for us,” sophomore point guard D’Mitrik Trice said after Wisconsin’s practice on Friday. “Nobody is going to feel sorry for us. We’ve got to continue to have each other’s back. The coaches are going to stay on us and we’re going to have to continue to prepare for the next game.”

And even though preparing for another team in just a few days is a challenge, Trice said having to move on quickly forces teams to learn what they can from a tough loss and then put it out of their minds just as fast.

“I think that if we had a week to prepare for the game you sulk on it a little bit longer,” Trice said Friday. “But with a game coming in the next two days we’ve got to get right to the next. We watched film, we learned from it, we flushed that game out. We’re just continuing to stay hungry and humble.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Badgers said going through the film of their loss to Minnesota wasn’t fun. Hitting just six shots in 20 minutes of action on your home court will do that. But sophomore guard Brad Davison said he thought the team was able to take away the right lessons from the morning film session and turn the page before practice.

“We had a really good practice. Rough film session. Coach (Greg Gard) got on us pretty good,” Davison said. “There’s a lot of missed opportunities and mental lapses that definitely shot ourselves in the foot. That’s kind of been the common theme with the four losses that we have on the year. But again they’re learning opportunities and we have our whole season in front of us. It’s back to work.”

At the very least the Badgers took some comfort in that they played relatively strong defense against the Gophers, holding them under 60 points and less than one point per possession in both halves of the game - but Davison said one key for UW as they prepare to take on Penn State will be to start making shots when they get good looks - and do the other little things that help win games on the nights when even your good shots aren’t falling.

“Shots will come and go,” Davison said. “That’s something you can’t control. We were getting good looks. Defensively we played pretty well throughout the game. We held them under one point per possession in both halves. There’s lots to be happy with, but you know when it comes down to it you can’t dig yourselves a hole like that. When shots aren’t falling you’ve got to find other ways to score, other ways to be productive.”

That didn’t happen on Thursday night at the Kohl Center - and soon enough we’ll see how well the Badgers were able to move on and prepare for the next team on the docket. Beating a team like Penn State is hard enough on the road - the Badgers will have to make sure they stop beating themselves as well if they want to leave State College with another Big Ten win.

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John Veldhuis covers Wisconsin football, basketball and recruiting for BadgerBlitz.com on the Rivals.com network. Follow him on Twitter at @JohnVeldhuis.