You know what happens when you ignore the 7,000-pound elephant in the room, don't you?

An awful mess starts to pile up, one that even a seasoned zoo keeper or hazmat team member wouldn't want to touch.

Well, cover your noses, because we're going in.

The NCAA Frozen Four for women's hockey will be staged this week at the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center.

This is pertinent because the University of Wisconsin will not only be taking part, it will be seeking its third straight NCAA title.

The other three participants — Harvard, Minnesota-Duluth and New Hampshire — offer compelling on-ice storylines.

The Badgers face top-ranked and once-beaten Harvard in the semifinals Thursday.

This is a rematch of the NCAA quarterfinals last March when the teams played four epic overtimes at the Kohl Center before UW emerged with a 1-0 victory.

Meanwhile, Duluth lost to the Badgers in the NCAA title game last season, but has won three of four meetings between the teams this season en route to Western Collegiate Hockey Association regular-season and playoff titles.

As for New Hampshire, UW is winless in seven previous meetings (0-6-1) against the perennial Hockey East Association powerhouse. That includes a pair of 2-1 losses to the second-ranked Wildcats in November in Durham, N.H.

It would be great if everyone could focus on the essence of those plots, but it's hard to do so when the vile smell makes your eyes water.

It's been just more than a month since it was reported Duluth likely used an ineligible player for most of the regular season.

Iya Gavrilova, a 20-year-old freshman from Krasnoyarsk, Russia, had 19 goals and 22 assists in 26 games before the Duluth News-Tribune checked into her background.

Turns out Gavrilova received a salary and a stipend worth $500 a month while playing for Moscow SKIF from 2002 to '06. Those details — confirmed by the paper in a telephone interview with Sergei Ivanovich Kolotnev, a Moscow SKIF official — strongly suggest NCAA amateurism rules were broken.

The story broke right around Valentine's Day, prompting officials at the school and the NCAA to say an investigation is being conducted.

We're still waiting for the results, which is not only a shame, it's a sham.

If the accusations are bogus, someone should have figured that out by now and exonerated the Bulldogs before the biggest event in women's college hockey comes to town.

If Duluth coach Shannon Miller broke the rules, that should have been verified and appropriate sanctions — suspensions and/or game forfeitures — should have been handed down long before we got to this point.

Right now, there's no way you can look at the Bulldogs and think they've been treated fairly. Either they're victims of bureaucratic foot-dragging,  especially the student-athletes, or their involvement in the Frozen Four is forever tainted.

Officials from the NCAA, UMD and the WCHA share the blame for this because they kept ignoring the elephant in the room.

How they did so is beyond me because, man, it really stinks in here.