From March through September there was palpable, permeable excitement.
Women's basketball, from college through the WNBA and onto the Olympics, seemed to pierce through the noise and become a cultural touch point — for all the (mostly) good and (some) bad that entails.
At the centre of it all was Caitlin Clark, the Iowa superstar whose logo three-pointers vaulted her squad to the national title game before she was drafted first overall to the Indiana Fever and went on to set scoring records while winning WNBA Rookie of the Year.
Clark quickly became a bona fide A-list celebrity, the type who gets top billing at an LPGA Tour pro-am alongside tournament namesake Annika Sorrenstam.