The Enchantment of Viewing Caitlin Clark.

I started writing this story in March of last year, but I never finished it because with 13 seconds remaining, an Iowa transfer who was playing for Creighton, fed up with sitting on the sidelines in Des Moines, made a three-pointer that eliminated the Hawkeyes from the NCAA Tournament.

Since then, it has been on my mind a lot. I knew winter would return even as March’s insanity subsided and life resumed its regularly scheduled programming in the spring and summer. And with it came basketball, and with it Caitlin Clark, the lanky twenty-one-year-old who just won the Naismith Player of the Year award, which goes to the top collegiate player in the league, following an incredible junior campaign.

In less than a day, Iowa will play in its first Final Four in thirty years. Against South Carolina, she will face up against Aaliyah Boston, the star player from last year’s Naismith Trophy and the person who Clark’s detractors will probably tweet should have won instead.

A lot has happened in my life since Clark and her Iowa teammates were eliminated from the NCAA Tournament in March of last year. I’ve fractured my foot, changed careers, sold and bought a house, watched my children grow older, and played hundreds of hours of competitive sports. Apart from witnessing Lionel Messi during the World Cup in Qatar, I have never experienced anything that can match the intensity of witnessing Clark dribble up a court while holding a basketball.

which is rather illogical when you stop to think about it.

One is that, except from March, I live in Lady Vol country, where TV coverage of Iowa games is rare. In fact, I’m not sure I could tell you right now where Iowa is located on a map or which states it borders without using Google.

The fact that I am not a basketball player is another factor. Sincerely, I’m not even a fan of basketball. The New Jersey Nets game that my church’s youth leaders took us to during my senior year of high school was the only live game I watched between the eighth grade and the age of 25. Then, in 2014, I watched Manu Ginobili’s final fantastic postseason run with the San Antonio Spurs as I prepared to start a summer internship at ESPN. That winter, after finishing graduate school, I began working in women’s sports, took my coworkers to their first Lady Vols game, and saw my employers run clinics for girls in Mexico and play pick-up on public courts in Sao Paulo1.

Then I met Haley, and I watched her vanish under covers onto her couch when we watched TV and watched a laptop game during our first March together. She didn’t appear to sleep for days, and whenever I visited, she was always wearing the same terrible pair of boy’s basketball shorts. She lived off goldfish and Life cereal right out of the box, not wanting to miss a single second of basketball on television due to the inconvenient, time-consuming task of pouring milk into a bowl. During the college playoff season, I had developed a deep romantic attachment to a black bear.

Eventually, I came to terms with this. And in 2019 I went into hibernation with her.

On March 17, the day the Volunteer men faced Kentucky in the semifinal of the SEC Tournament, I drove her to the airport and then came back to Fieldhouse Social to watch with my in-laws and their friends before she went for a spring break girls’ vacation to Florida. She was probably startled because, for the first time, I watched basketball on my own initiative. It seems like she experienced the same emotions as a parent whose child told them they were no longer playing because they wanted to, but also because they had learnt to love what they loved.

We’ve watched a lot of basketball together since then3. Clark initially appeared on our TV screen in 2021. In the Sweet 16 matchup between her Iowa squad and UConn, I listened as media promoted the match by drawing comparisons between Paige Bueckers, the one teenage sensation I was aware of, and this other Iowan I was unaware of. It was a routine contest, with the Huskies winning by 20 points. However, it seems like I had some kind of internal forcefield disruption while I watched Clark, who finished the game with 21 points and five assists. Because I paid close attention to her breaking records over the next season. I saw videos on YouTube of her making half-court logo three-pointers and making lightning-fast passes to teammates, more akin to a teenager from South America.