A day that could not have been better for Hawkeyes women’s basketball

IOWA CITY — It was perfect.

The play that set up Caitlin Clark’s buzzer-beating game-winner? Pretty much. The shot Clark took? Of course.

But the game, the day, this moment in time for Iowa women’s basketball — how do you get everything you want, and in fairy tale form? The sixth-ranked Iowa women’s basketball team did so with their 86-85 win over Big Ten-champion/No. 2-ranked Indiana Sunday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

It began with ESPN’s “College Game Day” here Sunday morning for a live hour of programming. It ended with a game that network had to have been thrilled to be able to telecast.

When it’s played at a sky-high level by two great teams, basketball is such a beautiful game. This was a tense, ferocious, jazzy, beautiful battle between two terrific teams that didn’t blink under the watchful eyes of the nation and the 15,056 fans in the gym.

Indiana was the perfect opponent for the occasion, a team with gifted players across its lineup who made big play after big play and came back time after time whenever Iowa seemed poised to pull away.

But the Hoosiers didn’t have Clark. Indiana took an 85-83 with 1.5 seconds left on a pair of Mackenzie Holmes free throws. That was too much time left.

Iowa senior Monika Czinano, whistled perhaps unfairly for the foul that gave Holmes those foul shots, set a pick on Indiana’s relentless Chloe Moore-McNeil that knocked the guard to the floor. That was the opening Clark needed.

Moore-McNeil lunged at Clark a nanosecond late. Clark shot over her with form that wasn’t as textbook as she normally displays, but the ball still went in the basket for the win.

“Honestly, I thought it was money,” Clark told ESPN’s Holly Rowe immediately after the game. But at a postgame press conference, Clark added “It kind of spun around for a second, but it went down.”

Clark had stamped her name into the national sports consciousness before Sunday. But that shot against a great team, and those images of her running off the court and to the fans as a pied piper with the rest of her teammates in pursuit, had to convince a lot of American hoops fans of this:

Clark isn’t just the National Player of the Year in women’s basketball. She’s the Player of the Year in college ball, period.

But don’t overlook Czinano. She and McKenna Warnock were feted in the Senior Day ceremony after the game. They have been two vital factors in the mass quantity of winning Lisa Bluder’s program has done the last few years.

Czinano has been as good for Clark as vice versa. Czinano has 2,261 career points! Because she has been so effective at scoring in the post, opponents haven’t been able to overplay Clark as much as they’d like.

Going against All-America-to-be Holmes, Czinano had a challenging first three quarters. She scored nine points in the fourth, however, and that screen she set to free Clark at the end was a doozy.

“I remember in practice not setting it great and (Clark) not getting the shot,” Czinano said. “So I just knew that was going to have to be there. I told her during the huddle, ‘Really wait for it, let me come get there.’ It just kind of worked out perfectly.”

As her players covered all sorts of ground while rejoicing in the win, Bluder appeared a bit dazed on the sideline.

“I feel like this is part of our growth,” she said. “Being able to get GameDay, being able to have sold-out crowds, and people talking about women’s basketball around the state, and people being excited about women’s basketball around the state. It’s what you dream about, right?”

Bluder is in her 23rd year as the Hawkeyes’ coach, and things have yet to get stale.

“There’s never been better role models of what it means to be strong women leaders in a coaching position where men rule,” Czinano said of her four coaches, all women. “It’s been such an inspiring thing to see.

“Knowing we have engineers on our team, future doctors, future dentists going into fields that are male-dominated. So it’s so big and so influential for us to see (Bluder) making waves like we never thought we’d ever see.”

Then there’s wave-maker Clark, fierce and fearless, taking the shot everyone knew she’d take, getting it to spin through the net, making a run to fans she didn’t know immediately afterward.

“You know I’m all about the women’s game,” Clark said, “and I’m glad I gave something little girls can probably scream about at the top of their lungs.”

Great player. Great game. Great day.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com