Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese1 lived up to the hype.
It’s so rare when a sporting event with outsized expectations meets or exceeds the excitement built into it. Super Bowls are as likely to be duds as they are to be classics, and the game itself often serves as a secondary concern for many of the people watching it. Since college football instituted a playoff in 2014, there have been 30 playoff games and nine of them have been one-score games. When the vanguard of talking-head media personalities have ample time to hype up an event, the resulting contest would have a hard time living up to the billing anyway; that so much bloviating air time, column inches and internet ink is spilled over outright stinkers makes those results almost suck twice as hard.
Even Zach Edey-Dalton Knecht—the most ballyhooed individual matchup in the men’s tournament—fell a little flat. Both those guys balled absolutely out of their minds, and I don’t think anybody can dispute that. But their teammates combined to shoot 31.7% from the floor on Sunday and reduced the proceedings to a shot-making contest between one guy who sank buckets at a 62.4% mark for the season and another who hit at a 45.8% clip. In spurts, Knecht could (and did) outshine Edey; in the long run, with no one else for either team bothering to do much of anything2, Edey’s steadiness was going to win out3.