We watch in the hope that all our questions and maybes will harden, over the course of a game, into certainties, but even after the final buzzer sounds, sports has a maddening way of leaving us with a litany of “what-ifs.”
In the final five seconds of what was the most anticipated college basketball game since … well, chart-topping Iowa-LSU earlier this week, the ball was in the hands of one of the game’s central characters, Paige Bueckers, with her UConn Huskies down one point against Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
For UConn, the plan was methodically laid out: After advancing the ball past half court, Bueckers, like she’s done 100 times, would flip the ball to Aaliyah Edwards following a screen for a short roll jumper, a shot that butters her bread.
But we never got to see the ending. Maybe Edwards’s shot would have dropped through the net. Maybe it would have caromed off the rim. As the years pass and we revisit this game, we’ll always wonder: What if the refs hadn’t whistled Edwards for a mind-melting moving screen in the closing seconds of a Final Four game? Was it a foul? Sure. But there’s a foul on nearly every play, and sometimes discretion is the better part of enforcement. The Huskies commanded the first half, lost the lead in the second, clawed their way back in the final minutes, and drew up a great play that could have given us an all-time finish, only for UConn to be robbed of the agency to determine its fate. It was like watching The Gladiator and having it glitch right as Russell Crowe tilts his knife toward Joaquin Phoenix.
It was a deeply unsatisfying ending, leaving us talking about all the wrong things. Conspiracy theorists will say that Iowa’s 71-69 win was rigged in favor of college basketball’s golden girl. The realists will remind you that Clark, who missed her final free throw with three seconds left, actually gave UConn another opening it never capitalized on because the Huskies failed to consider one of the game’s great afterthoughts: boxing out. Bueckers pointed to other plays the Huskies could have made to alter their fate. “You can look at one play and say that killed us or hurt us,” she said, “but we should have done a better job—I should have done a better job—of making sure we didn’t leave the game up to chance.”
When you think about it, isn’t arguing over maybes and controversial calls a hallmark of mainstream arrival? UConn-Iowa didn’t stick the landing, but it’ll still go down as a classic. Iowa’s March Madness run, which will culminate in either a win or a loss in Sunday’s championship game against South Carolina, has been a dance between inevitability and survival. There are times when Clark, with her back-to-back-to-back logo 3s, makes you wonder if any force in college basketball, even the Gamecocks’ top-ranked perimeter defense, could stop her. And then you watch her sabotage herself, as she did in the first half against UConn, with laissez-faire turnovers and ill-advised 3s.
You could view Friday’s whole game through the lens of the Clark versus Bueckers debate, and it draws a clear pathway to improvement for both players. Would you rather take Clark, whose game-changing shooting and playmaking raise Iowa’s offensive floor to historic levels? Or the well-rounded, versatile Bueckers, who also shoots and creates for others at an elite, if not epochal, level but can also play and guard multiple positions while carefully dissecting half-court defenses like a thoracic surgeon? My favorite NBA corollary: Steph Curry versus Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
In the first half, with UConn’s Nika Muhl picking up Clark full-court, face-guarding her and following her every twitch, I found myself wishing Clark would back-cut to the baseline like Bueckers, or screen multiple times in a play and make meaningful contact like Bueckers, or treat a possession like a precious commodity like Bueckers, or put a hand up on 3-point shooters like Bueckers. Clark was responsible for eight of Iowa’s 11 missed 3s and three of its 12 turnovers.
At halftime, Clark’s dad changed his hoodie—either because of superstition or sweat marks—and everything changed. As Clark found her range and honed her passing accuracy, I found myself wishing that Bueckers, who deferred to her teammates and found a spot to space the floor in response to Gabbie Marshall denying her the ball, would be more demanding. After the first quarter, when ESPN’s Holly Rowe asked UConn head coach Geno Auriemma how he felt about all the other Huskies getting hot from beyond the arc, he laughed and said, “It kills our offense because she’s gotta get involved and make a couple of them,” adding that he told Bueckers as much, in a less gregarious tone, in the huddle. I wish she had taken being left open for 3 as both an affront and a golden opportunity, regardless of the shot clock, instead of letting the hope for a perfect shot be the enemy of a good shot and turning it over as a result, as she did with three minutes left in the third quarter. I wish she would have revoked her fealty to the system and become the system. I wish Geno hadn’t called the timeout when Bueckers had the ball in transition with 10 seconds left to go in the game down one.
Considering UConn’s injury-decimated roster and Iowa’s propensity for drawing fouls, you knew attrition and hard fouls and lactic acid would eventually be a factor. In the third quarter, after a gang rebounding pileup, Muhl, holding on to her leg, limped toward the locker room, changed her mind, and turned around. In that time, KK Arnold picked up her fourth foul defending four-on-three. Hannah Stuelke, the beneficiary, hit her free throws and gave Iowa its first lead of the game. A few possessions later, after taking an elbow to the nose from Edwards, Iowa’s Kate Martin headed down the tunnel too.
The Hawkeyes, the highest-scoring offense in the nation, held up well in this ugly, low-scoring affair, winning with just 71 points. Stuelke, who had fought off Angel Reese’s length and rebounding prowess in the Elite Eight, followed it up with a tournament-high 23-point performance in the Final Four. When Iowa’s perimeter offense sputtered in the first half, Stuelke’s face-up game kept the Hawkeyes in the contest and put Edwards in foul trouble. Clark’s confidence remained clear-eyed, even if her accuracy wavered. The senior-year savvy and teeth-clenching grit of Martin and Marshall have meshed well with Sydney Affolter, who plays with the lightness and confident aggression of youth. What they’ve lacked in five-star talent outside of Clark, they’ve made up for with cohesion and a talent for survival, second-half comebacks, gang rebounding, and smart tactical concessions.
In the game’s penultimate possession, with everyone’s heads still spinning after the controversial call on Edwards, an inbounding Clark, looking for any way to wind the clock down to zero, bounced the ball off the leg of an unsuspecting Bueckers and let it go out of bounds, taking 0.3 seconds off the clock. Spiritually, the move felt connected to Clark’s logo 3s: analytical and improvisational at once, and a touch risky, combining style, flair, and function in a manner that feels embarrassing for the recipient, whether it’s intentional or not. You already got the win. Do you really have to look that cool while doing it?
It was a feat of superior awareness, a split-second recognition of the kind of edge you don’t study in film but only learn because you saw another sicko do it and stored it in a memory folder labeled “kill shots.”
After the game, she tried to explain it in the most affable way possible. “I think, it’s just like, I watch a lot of basketball. I understand basketball. She had her back turned to me. The biggest thing at that point of the game is you just want the clock to go down. You don’t want to give them the ball, but she had her back completely turned and I just went for it, and it kind of worked.”
Clark’s gambit paid off, while errors of omission, down to the final shot the Huskies never got, cost UConn in the end.
