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…