The best thing about this sport is all the time. By design, tournaments are abrupt and unforgiving. They reduce a player to her worst game. They collapse history. They cut stories short. And that’s supposed to be the fun part: the madness. We’re meant to take some pleasure in entropy, in the suddenness of the endings, in the business left unfinished. But the truth is that every March is sweeter for November, and for January, and for last March and for next March. The real fun of women’s college basketball is that you get these great players, and you get them for so much time. That was all I could think on Monday night as the camera showed JuJu Watkins wiping away tears with the hem of her jersey while Paige Bueckers whispered something into her ear. Watkins plays the kind of game that obscures just how young she is, and suddenly her real age shocked me. She had so much time left, so many more games to play at USC, a fact UConn's former freshman phenom herself knew well.
At its greatest, women's basketball feels exactly this way. Insular, self-referential. The top five players in the 2020 college recruiting class were, in some order, Bueckers, Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, South Carolina's Kamilla Cardoso and Stanford's Cameron Brink. All five have now played in a national championship game. They have haunted each other for a long time; each has stood in another's way. Clark and Bueckers will play their second game against each other tonight, having already met as freshmen in the Sweet Sixteen. “I was looking back and I saw some old footage of that game and we both look really, really young,” Clark said yesterday. “It's cool to see how our careers have evolved.” It is cool to see careers evolve over four years; it’s been just as interesting to watch the rest of the world evolve, too. Maybe Lisa Bluder, who couldn’t cross half-court when she grew up playing basketball in Iowa, thinks about this often. Maybe Kim Mulkey, when she read a Los Angeles Times columnist call her players “dirty debutantes,” thought the world hadn't actually changed that much.
