Wrap your head around this impossible but amusing scenario: college students Tom Wolf and Barry Soetoro sitting on a secluded dormitory couch, sharing a fat marijuana cigarette.

It’s impossible, mainly for two reasons:

- Wolf, was — and still is — 13 years older than Soetoro, better known to posterity as President Barack Obama. So although they’re both proud progressive Democrats, they’re not really contemporaries.

- Our governor’s curriculum vitae stands as clear, documented evidence that Wolf was much too busy leading an academic virtuoso career Dartmouth, the University of London and MIT during the late 1960s and early ’70s to spend much time indulging in extracurricular activities like smoking dope.

So it only adds intrigue to the question: What’s Gov. Wolf thinking these days about marijuana?

Until this week, Wolf has said he would want to study the experience of states where marijuana has been legalized before delving into the question of legalizing recreational pot in the Keystone State. OK. That’s a steadfast position.

But on Wednesday, Wolf cast aside his customary unwillingness to discuss legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes and signaled he’s ready to take a look at the issue as it gathers popularity and momentum.

Why the paradigm? Well, Wolf has been re-elected to his second term — his final term — meaning he’s a lame duck and can’t run again. The status of future ineligibility connotes an odd sense of liberation — the statesman is free to make decisions purely on what he or she believes is right, rather than on what’s politically expedient.

And it might be presumptive on our part — or not — to interpret Wolf’s shift on recreational marijuana as from one of political expediency to one that he believes is best for Pennsylvania. Or to put it plainly, Wolf can speak his mind now that the elections are over for him.

So it’s hard not to find a little amusement in the notion that Wolf, like Obama, enters the no-election zone with newfound freedom of expression.

Of course, the governor will be expected to follow through on his previous commitment to study states where recreational marijuana is legal. He’ll be expected to track the good, the bad, the ugly, and the unexpected impacts. What are the benefits? What are the liabilities?

For many, it’s the lure of generating huge revenue. For the licensed few already providing medicinal marijuana in Pennsylvania — companies like the Cresco Yeltrah dispensary in Butler — it’s a matter of protecting very large investments already made in this new industry. And rightly so.

For countless potential consumers, it’s the attraction of quality assurance and the peace of mind in knowing their indulgence will be law-abiding. Finally, and perhaps for Wolf the most satisfying, a new and abundant source of government tax revenue.

Nonetheless, when a graying generation of Tom Wolfs and Barry Soetoros reminisce fondly about their college days, when they first discovered the secret thrills of smoldering herbal enhancements, did they ever imagine that bringing their indulgences into the light of day could become so complicated? Would they have guessed that deregulating their vice would require such a drawn-out lobbying effort, entailing as many regulatory steps as it has?

No, probably not. Nothing was that complicated back then.