brian thompson yachtsman

Brian Thompson (sailor)

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Brian Thompson (born 5 March 1962) is a British yachtsman. [1] He was the first Briton to twice break the speed record for sailing around the world, and the first to sail non-stop around the world four times. He is highly successful offshore racer on all types of high-performance yachts, from 21-foot Mini Transat racers to 140-foot Maxi Trimarans. [2]

He started his career in the OSTAR in 1992 with his own yacht. He sailed a lot on multihulls with Steve Fosset with whom he set several records, mainly the around the world sailing record in 2004.

In 2005, he won the Oryx Quest , round the world crewed race, on Doha 2006 , ex- Club Med . In 2006, he won the Volvo Ocean Race on ABN AMRO One as a crewmember of Mike Sanderson . The same year, he finished 6th in the Route du Rhum , in IMOCA class. He finished 5th of the Vendée Globe 2008–2009 on a 60 feet IMOCA class Bahrain Team Pindar   [ fr ] . [3]

In 2012, he won the Jules Verne Trophy as helmsman and trimmer for Loïck Peyron , on the maxi-multihull Banque Populaire V . [4] He then became the first British sailor with four non-stop laps of the world.

Caterham Challenge

Following the announcement in April that Brian had joined MGI in the role as sailing director, [5] MGI announced on 15 May 2013 that Caterham Technology and Caterham Composites, part of the Caterham Group , have joined with MGI CEO Mike Gascoyne and MGI Sailing Director Brian Thompson to run a Class40 offshore racing campaign under the banner of "Caterham Challenge". [6] [7]

This two-year campaign follows on from Mike's successful 2012 solo transatlantic aboard a "Caterham Challenge" branded Class40. The Campaign objectives are to bring F1 standards of technology and logistics to off-shore racing, to encourage green, sustainable and reusable energy technologies in the marine, automotive and aerospace sectors and to utilize Caterham's extensive experience in F1, R&D, engineering, competitive sailing and sports marketing. [8]

MGI built an Akilara RC3 Class40 and launched the racing boat in late August. Caterham Challenge was first on public display during the Southampton boat show 2013 followed by sailing and training in The Solent and the English Channel.

The racing calendar for "Caterham Challenge" includes the Transat Jacques Vabre 2013, the Grenada sailing week and the Caribbean 600 in early 2014, together with the Global Ocean Race, leaving from the Southampton Boatshow in September 2014 around the world. [9] [10]

Caterham Challenge started at the Transat Jacques Vabre on 7 November 2013 with Mike Gascoyne as skipper and Brian Thompson as co-skipper, leaving Le Havre, France for Itajai, Brazil. [11]

• [2] "Welcome to the Caterham Challenge" . Archived from the original on 13 June 2013 . Retrieved 18 May 2013 .
• [3] "My Sport: Brian Thompson, Vendee Globe offshore racer" .
• [4] Brian Thompson breaks round-the-world record
• [5] "MGI   » Who We Are" . Archived from the original on 3 December 2012 . Retrieved 17 May 2013 .
• [6] "Caterham to back Mike Gascoyne's sailing campaign - SportsPro Media" . 25 June 2013.
• [7] "Caterham F1 boss Mike Gascoyne to join world of ocean racing" . Independent.co.uk . 15 May 2013.
• [8] "What can sailing learn from F1?" . BBC Sport .
• [9] "Caterham Challenge - A powerful new force" .
• [10] "Caterham to back Mike Gascoyne's sailing campaign - SportsPro Media" . 25 June 2013.
• [11] "Caterham Challenge: Mike Gascoyne looks ahead to the Transat Jacques" . Independent.co.uk . 31 October 2013.

External links

• Official website
• Maxi Trimaran Banque Populaire V
• MGIconsultancy.com
• CaterhamChallenge.com

Yachtsman Brian Thompson Describes Jubilation After World Record Circumnavigation Of The Globe

A British sailor told today of his jubilation after he broke the world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the world in any type of yacht.

Brian Thompson, who wrote daily blogs about his experience, said he was "quite emotional" about his achievement and is considering writing a book about his adventure.

Thompson was the only British crew member on board the Banque Populaire V that completed the journey after 45 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes and 53 seconds.

The 14-strong crew of the 40-metre maxi-trimaran crossed the Jules Verne Trophy finish line at Brest, France, at 10.14pm on Friday, smashing the existing record of 48 days, 7 hours, 44 minutes and 52 seconds by nearly three days.

Thompson, 49, who is based in Southampton, chronicled the trip on an online blog on his mobile phone, attracting thousands of followers on the social networking site Twitter.

"Sometimes I think it would be cool to write a book about a trip like this and you could use the blog as a basis for it.

"There are so many more things that happened, like conversations with people, that you want to remember," he said.

A flotilla of boats and crowds on the dock welcomed the crew home and Thompson, who has sailed more than 100,000 miles with American adventurer Steve Fossett, said that he'll miss the crew after spending so much time with them.

"It was quite emotional crossing the line and realising what a bond you made with the guys and especially the three others you're on watch with because you tend to see those people the most.

"You spend two thirds of 45 days together with them so that's a lot of time. You have to rely on them for your safety," he said.

The yachtsman described his teammates, who hail from a number of countries but all share a knowledge of the French language, as "talented, industrious, dedicated, fun and welcoming to an English guy with schoolboy French".

He added: "To achieve my dream of finally holding the Trophee Jules Verne...feels absolutely fantastic. At the same time, to become the first Briton to sail around the world non-stop four times is just amazing and feels very special."

The crew had already broken four speed records on this journey around the globe - one to the equator, one to the Cape of Good Hope, one to Cape Leeuwin, and one from equator to equator.

Thompson cited the stretch up the South Atlantic, past Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, as his favourite of the trip due to the pleasant weather and said the whole journey allowed him to see "real wonders of the natural world".

He is a real lover of being out at sea and his blog gives readers an insight into what life was like on an isolated vessel in the middle of the world's oceans.

"I really do enjoy being at sea. Some people that go racing, they like it for the racing and see the wet and the cold as something they have to put up with, but I actually really enjoy the tranquility of it, as well as the racing," he said.

The low points of the trip came when the crew lost two days due to weather delays both in the Pacific and North Atlantic and when they missed spending Christmas and New Year ashore with family and friends. Instead, Thompson had a Christmas pudding made of energy bars made for him by the team.

Thompson has been racing two and three-hulled speed machines for 20 years notching up 25 sailing records, and plans to beat his personal best in this year's Vendée Globe solo race around the world in which he came 5th in 2008.

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Brian Thompson 'ecstatic' after breaking world record

• Published 7 January 2012

"Like all things, it happened in a pub," said record-breaking yachtsman Brian Thompson, reflecting on how the idea to travel around the world was first dreamt up.

Speaking from Brest in France, the 49-year-old, from Southampton, said the trip of a lifetime came after a chance meeting at Cowes on the Isle of Wight with Kevin Escoffier from Banque Populaire.

"He was looking for experienced round-the-world sailors, so I got invited onboard to do some short trips," said Thompson.

His boat, the 40m-long maxi-trimaran Banque Populaire V, crossed the Jules Verne Trophy finish line in Brest at 22:14 GMT on Friday, smashing the existing record by nearly three days.

As a member of the 14-strong crew on board, Thompson himself broke the world record for the fastest circumnavigation.

'A real dream'

Mr Thompson, whose job onboard the boat was as helmsman and trimmer, said: "I was driving the boat, which was a real dream, and helping with all the sail changes and trimming the sails."

By crossing the finish line in a total of 45 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes and 53 seconds, he has also become the first Briton to circumnavigate the globe non-stop for a fourth time, beating existing records held by fellow Hampshire sailors Dee Caffari and Mike Golding.

A flotilla of boats and crowds on the dock welcomed the 14 crew back to Brest.

"We saw the lights from about 20 miles out and everyone was just ecstatic," he said.

"I was so happy. It's my fourth time around the world non-stop, this has been the best, on the fastest boat in the world."

The circumnavigation had to be completed unassisted, with only human power manning the boat - with no electric or hydraulic winches.

He said: "Eighteen years ago the record was 79 days and now we've got it down to 45 days. It was an incredible run, we were ahead of the record most of the way.

"It was the trip of a lifetime, we saw some amazing sights, icebergs, comets and albatross, but I am very glad to be back on land."

The yachtsman has been racing two and three-hulled speed machines for 20 years and has notched up 25 sailing records.

"I am looking to do the next Vendee Globe, I think I have two more laps of the planet in me," he said.

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VIDEO: take our exclusive video tour of MOD70 trimaran Phaedo³, primed for the Caribbean 600 record

• Elaine Bunting
• February 23, 2015

Brian Thompson shows us round the MOD70 trimaran Phaedo³, in which he and the crew are hoping to break the Caribbean 600 record

Racing sailors like to say that if you want to win, then take a gun to a knife fight. US sailor Lloyd Thornburg has got himself an appropriate weapon in his new boat, MOD70 trimaran Phaedo3. Get a tour of this phenomenal trimaran here.

With a rock star crew of Michel Desjoyeaux, Brian Thompson, Pete Cumming and Sam Goodchild, Thornburg is aiming to blaze round the RORC Caribbean 600 race to line honours, and hopefully to set a new course record this week. The record of 40 hours 11 mins has stood since 2009, when it was set on an ORMA 60 trimaran.

To say she’s fast would be a huge understatement: the boat made the crossing from Brittany to Antigua in February in just over nine days.

In this video, Brian Thompson takes us on a tour of the new Phaedo (Thornburg’s previous regatta weapon was a Gunboat 66). Brian shows us the curved foils and explains how they work, the rotating and canting wingmast, and the hydraulic systems that depower the mainsail and are an essential safety feature on this massively powered up multihulls.

The video also shows what the accommodation looks like below – small, but with everything needed for offshore racing.

Commenting on his new project, Thornburg says:

“Brian Thompson and I have been working on getting a MOD 70 for two years and it only came to fruition in January. Phaedo 3 sailed direct from France, across the Atlantic. She was originally Foncia, skippered by Michel Desjoyeaux and Michel will be racing with us for the RORC Caribbean 600. Brian Thompson put all the crew together and from what he has told me about Michel, he is an extraordinary sailor.

“For me this race is just fantastic, once you have gone around this course fast, you just want to go faster and that is the real driving force behind the MOD70. As far as the record is concerned, the boat and the crew are capable of beating it but we will wait to see what the conditions are like for the race and we know we have to finish the course before we can start talking about record pace. Besides keeping our eye on the competition, we will be watching the clock for sure.”

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Brian Thompson receives Order of Bahrain

• April 15, 2009

British Vendee Globe skipper honoured by King

Bahrain Team Pindar’s record-breaking yachtsman, Brian Thompson was yesterday awarded the Order of Bahrain, from The King of Bahrain, His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. The prestigious accolade was awarded for the British skipper’s historic completion of the Vendée Globe solo, non-stop, around-the-world yacht race – the first time a yacht carrying the King’s name and the Kingdom of Bahrain livery, has sailed around the globe.

Thompson, 47, who is visiting the Kingdom of Bahrain for the first time since completing the race in February, was presented to the King at a special reception in Manama, attended by other senior Bahrain representatives.

The King praised Thompson for his outstanding achievement and for promoting the Kingdom of Bahrain to a global audience.

On receiving the award, Thompson said: ‘I am immensely proud to receive this award from His Majesty King Hamad. It was an honour and a privilege to sail around the world on a yacht bearing both his name and the national identity of the Kingdom of Bahrain. Throughout the race I received tremendous support from people throughout the Kingdom and this visit has afforded me a wonderful opportunity to thank many of them in person.’

On November 9, 2008, Thompson embarked on the biggest race of his career, setting sail from Les Sables d’Olonne on the West Coast of France on his first ever solo circumnavigation. Just 11 of the original 30 skippers completed the 28,000-mile voyage and after a total of 98 days at sea, Thompson returned to a hero’s welcome, finishing in fifth place.

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​Gavin Reid ‘honoured’ with nomination for prestigious YJA Yachtsman of the Year Awards

25 October 2016

Mission Performance round the world crew member Gavin Reid, 28, has been shortlisted alongside world leading sailors for the industry renowned 2016 boats.com YJA (Yachting Journalists' Association) Yachtsman of the Year Award, and Young Sailor of the Year Award.

Gavin, (pictured receiving the Henri Lloyd Seamanship Award at Race Finish with his team mates) who is nominated alongside 2016 Olympic Finn Class Gold Medalist Giles Scott and Round the Island Race record setter Brian Thompson, says: “It is a real honour to have made the final three for 2016 boats.com YJA's Yachtsmen of the Year alongside such titans of the sport as Brian Thompson and Giles Scott, and also to be nominated for the Young Sailor of the Year Award. I am overwhelmed by the amount of praise I have received for taking part in the rescue, though to me it pales in comparison to the achievements in yachting that others have accomplished over the year.

(Gavin pictured in the yellow drysuit climbing the mast to rescue the crew member at the top of the mast)

Gavin Reid and his Mission Performance crew were competing in Race 6 of the 14-stage Clipper 2015-16 Race, from Hobart to the Whitsundays, Australia, when an SOS was picked up from a yacht which had a crewman stuck at the top of the mast.

Mission Performance was the nearest to the stricken vessel and Skipper Greg Miller and his crew immediately abandoned their Clipper Race campaign to assist. Gavin, who was born deaf in both ears and had zero sailing experience prior to signing up for the Clipper Race had developed into a watch leader on board. He volunteered to swim from the Clipper 70 to the other yacht where he found four of the crew onboard incapacitated and unable to help their crewmate who had been tangled in halyards at the top of the mast for several hours. Using the one remaining staysail halyard, Gavin was able to hoist himself two thirds of the way up the swinging mast, then climbed the rest of the way hand-over-hand to reach the crewman, untangle the lines and help to lower him down safely. Mission Peformance then returned to the Clipper Race and were provided redress points for the incident before completing the remaining nine races of the circumnavigation. On arrival back to London in July this year Gavin was also awarded the race's Henri Lloyd Seamanship Award. Clipper Race Chairman Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, four time winner of the YJA Yachtsman of the Year Award, says: “Gavin Reid’s nomination for the YJA Yachtsman of the Year and Young Sailor of the Year Awards are highly deserved. Not only did he make a very courageous and selfless decision to help a fellow yachtsman in need in challenging circumstances, he also continually impressed me throughout the entire circumnavigation. “One of 40 per cent of our Clipper Race crew who had no previous sailing experience, Gavin was a natural and fast became a very integral member of his Mission Performance team. I hope his experiences and this recognition inspire him to continue to pursue future sailing opportunities.”

Established in 1955, the Yachtsman of the Year Award is one of the top yachting honours. Previous winners of the award include Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Dame Ellen MacArthur and four-time Olympic gold medallist Sir Ben Ainslie. The Young Sailor of the Year Award was first awarded in 1993. Fellow Yachtsman of the Year Award nominee Giles Scott from Portsmouth capped a remarkable three-year unbeaten record in the Finn singlehander class by winning gold at the Rio Olympics. In doing so, he also retained his Finn Gold Cup world champion title for the third successive year, and also played a significant role as bowman and tactician aboard Britain’s Land Rover BAR America’s Cup challenge, which leads the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series going into the last event at Fukuoka, Japan on November 18.

Brian Thompson from Southampton, one of Britain’s leading multihull skippers, stormed round the Isle of Wight to break this year’s JP Morgan Round the Island Race record, completing the 50 mile distance in 2 hours 23 minutes 23 seconds in the MOD 70 trimaran Phaedo 3. Then in August, Thompson and his eight-strong Phaedo 3 crew repeated the performance to break the outright record with a time of 2 hours, 4 minutes 14 seconds – an average of 24.15 knots.

The other finalists for the 2016 boats.com Young Sailor of the Year Award are 15 year old 2016 Topper world champion Elliott Kuzyk, Tom Darling (18) and Crispin Beaumont (18), Bronze medalists at the 2016 29er World Championships, and powerboat racer Thomas Mantripp (15), who won this year’s GP RYA British GT15 and British Sprint Championship titles.

Ian Atkins, President of boats.com, says: “The open nominations process for these two awards highlighted the number of exceptional achievements that we have witnessed in 2016. Creating a shortlist of just three nominees for each category is never easy. We already look forward to announcing the YJA's winner in January 2017.” The winners of these premier British achievement awards will be announced at a gala luncheon on Tuesday, January 10, 2017 at Trinity House, London following a vote among members of the Yachting Journalists’ Association (YJA).

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LOFT SPOTLIGHT: Doyle Sails Solent

Just over a year ago, British sailing legends Peter Greenhalgh, Adrian Stead and Brian Thompson became part of the team at Doyle Sails Solent. As the home to one of the biggest sail lofts in the UK, the ultra-modern, 1000 sqm facility in Universal Marina on the River Hamble is about the size of four tennis courts which provides the capacity to build and service several sails at any one time.

While Doyle Sails has had a well-recognised presence in the UK since 1997, this brand-new facility, its location and talented team are taking Doyle Sails to a whole new level. A passionate and experienced group of sailors and sailmakers are committed to making your sailing more enjoyable, consistently delivering durable, reliable and easy to handle sails, every single time.

Positioned on the River Hamble, Doyle Sails Solent is very close to the Solent, the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and other key sailing hotspots on the South Coast of England – a region which truly represents the heart of British sailing.

“The most renowned events are Cowes Week and the Round the Island Race, along with the Isle of Wight race which goes past Portsmouth, Lymington and the southern coast,” said Grand Prix and Superyacht expert, Peter Greenhalgh.

“There is a rich history of sailing talent in the River Hamble region, and we have the pleasure of enjoying the most competitive yacht racing in the country, right on our doorstep. Due in part to the fact we have the best weather here in the south and in turn that tends to build up the racing component which we can do almost all year round.”

Greenhalgh, an early participant in the Extreme Sailing Series which ran from 2007 to 2018, is regarded as the most successful sailor from the series. Having won four overall titles including the very first season in 2007 as well as 2015. He and the current Doyle Sails Solent team continue to provide sails for all Grand Prix racing yachts, club racing teams, One Design classes and coastal cruisers. Their location means that they can also work with and service some of the most impressive Superyachts in the world.

“One of the main reasons we joined up with Doyle Sails International was because of Mike Sanderson – we wanted to be a part of the team that he is building,” Greenhalgh said. “Doyle Sails’ focus has always been on people, and building the best team that we possibly can to support the teams we work with”.

Doyle Sails Solent is a loft full of many talents, alongside Greenhalgh is Brian Thompson a well recognised British yachtsman. Brian made it into the history books by becoming the first (and only, so far) Briton to break the round the world sailing record twice as well as the first to sail around the world non-stop four times.

Brian is a vastly experienced and successful offshore sailor and was part of the Volvo Ocean Race winning team with Mike Sanderson’s ABN AMRO One crew in 2005/06. Brian has sailed a great many short-handed boats including Minis, Class 40s and IMOCA 60s, in which he completed the 2008 Vendee Globe. Lately, he has focused on large multihulls, especially MOD70s and 100ft+ multihulls.

“The calibre of the people who are involved with Doyle Sails and the way they work, fits with our ethics – and, Doyle sails are very competitively priced.”

Greenhalgh anticipates that as they continue to develop their new team, they will continue to grow and diversify to best suit their customer’s needs. “We came together as a team in April 2019, and so we are still developing and growing. We are currently finishing sails for a Sunfast 33, alongside a large service job on a Discovery 58 amongst several others”.

Greenhalgh notes that the teams’ affiliation with big boat sailing around the world has always been a big part of what they do. “We work a lot with the major Superyacht shipyards in the UK and love to be able to sea trial inventories for yachts being built out of yards like Pendennis. All three of us [Thompson, Stead and Greenhalgh] do a lot of Superyacht racing which is both a challenge and good fun with some very, very large teams on board.”

Complementing both Peter and Brian is Adrian Stead who has a wealth of Grand Prix racing experience and is a 14 time World Champion with teams such as RAN, Bella Mente, Mascalzone Latino and Quantum Racing. The Two-time Olympian and America’s Cup sailor has also got an Admirals’ Cup win, double Rolex Fastnet Race win and many other offshore race wins to his credit.

From Superyachts and Grand Prix race yachts right through to club racers and cruisers, Doyle Sails Solent have an expert team of sailors and sailmakers that are ready to join your team to help make your sailing more enjoyable.

Learn more about Doyle Sails Solent HERE.

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Kohberger murder trial judge will hear grand jury challenges mostly out of public’s view

Kevin Fixler, Idaho Statesman

MOSCOW ( Idaho Statesman ) — Attorneys for Bryan Kohberger, the man charged with murdering four University of Idaho students last fall, will argue at hearings Friday that their client’s indictment by a local grand jury should be thrown out on several procedural grounds, but only one of which will be debated in public.

Kohberger’s defense team in July filed a request to dismiss the indictment for what they contend was an error in the instructions given to the grand jurors. A month later, they submitted another filing to the court that cites four more legal challenges of the indictment that pushed the capital murder case to trial.

The procedural concerns Kohberger’s public defense raised last month include claims of grand jury bias, as well as the use of improper evidence and a lack of sufficient evidence to indict. The defense also alleged misconduct by the prosecution over its withholding of evidence from the grand jury that the defense says would disprove Kohberger’s guilt.

The defense filed those four follow-up challenges to the indictment under a court-approved seal, which keeps the details of the arguments hidden from the public. The prosecution’s objection also was held under a court seal.

Already, the use of a grand jury by state prosecutors is an intentionally secretive process. Defendants, their attorneys and the public are not permitted to attend. In turn, the defense is unable to cross-examine witnesses or object to certain evidence.

Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson sat the grand jury exclusively to review the Kohberger case, and it was presided over by retired Judge Jay Gaskill, previously of Idaho’s 2nd Judicial District in Nez Perce County, according to court records. Under Idaho law , only 12 of the 16 selected grand jurors must support indicting a defendant.

The grand jury met over three days and indicted Kohberger on May 16, the court records showed. He was arraigned on May 22, when he stood silent and declined to enter a plea , leading Judge John Judge of Idaho’s 2nd Judicial District in Latah County, who is overseeing the case, to default to not guilty.

The indictment vacated Kohberger’s scheduled June preliminary hearing, where a judge otherwise determines whether probable cause exists to move a case to trial. If the grand jury challenge is successful, the case likely would revert to a preliminary hearing, an alternative the defense offered in the challenge to the grand jury instructions.

Kohberger, 28, is accused of stabbing to death the four U of I students at an off-campus Moscow home in November 2022. The victims were seniors Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, both 21; and junior Xana Kernodle and freshman Ethan Chapin, both 20.

At the time, Kohberger was a graduate student in Washington State University’s criminal justice and criminology department. WSU is located in Pullman, about 9 miles west of Moscow.

Kohberger is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary. Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty if a jury convicts him.

Kohberger’s attorneys, in their argument against the instructions received by the grand jurors, asserted that the standard of proof in the Idaho Constitution demands the same level as a conviction at trial: beyond a reasonable doubt. Historically, the language has been interpreted to require the lower legal threshold of being more likely guilty than not, or what is known as probable cause. The same legal threshold is required to obtain a search warrant or make an arrest.

Jay Logsdon, one of Kohberger’s public defenders, in the defense’s filing implored Judge to rule for his client, which would support Idaho’s past efforts at “adopting reforms to the grand jury system intended to restore to that system its function as bulwark for freedom.”

Edwina Elcox is a Boise-based criminal defense attorney who formerly served as an Ada County deputy prosecutor. She commended the creativity of Kohberger’s public defenders in filing the legal threshold challenge but voiced doubts it would succeed.

“Obviously, it’s thoroughly researched and is a novel legal argument,” Elcox told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview. “But this is a loser motion before this court, and that’s the reality of the situation.”

The defense’s argument was unlikely to prevail at least in part because it would overturn the longstanding legal standard for an indictment, retired Idaho Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Jones previously told the Statesman . He described the effort as “some kind of Hail Mary thing.”

Judge will hear those arguments Friday afternoon. The defense’s other four legal claims aimed at tossing the grand jury indictment, however, will be debated during a morning session that is closed to the public, at the defense’s request and with no objection from prosecutors, court records showed.

All grand jury records, including transcripts and the jury selection list, are typically filed under court seal. The day after the indictment, Thompson also obtained a court order from Magistrate Judge Megan Marshall, who handled the Kohberger case in its early stages, to seal the names of the witnesses who testified before the grand jury .

At least two of the victims’ families recently voiced frustration about how information about the case has been released to the public as they advocated for maintaining cameras inside the courtroom. Judge has yet to issue his decision from a hearing on the matter last week.

Shanon Gray, attorney for the Goncalves family, issued a statement to the Statesman on behalf of his clients, as well as some members of the Kernodle family.

“This case is surrounded by secrecy. Everything is either sealed or redacted,” which leads to speculation, the statement read. “That speculation is fueled by the secrecy surrounding everything that is filed and every hearing that is closed off to the media and the public.”

The inherently secretive nature of grand juries makes assessing the potential at successful challenges difficult, Elcox said. But she questioned the need to restrict public access for the entirety of the hearing on the defense’s four more recent claims, given some are legal arguments over process.

“If the challenges are to individual grand jurors, then I can see the need to protect identities,” she said. “I can at least understand the theory behind that portion of it. But if they’re challenging irregularities like the prosecution did something wrong, I don’t know why you’d want that sealed.”

Even so, of the four arguments that the public won’t get to watch — and not knowing the specifics of the evidence-based challenges — Elcox said the defense’s best possible chance of overturning the indictment would be assertions of bias from the local grand jury.

“That’s where it’s likely going to be because you’re dealing with an extremely small community, where a large portion of revenue and employment is literally centered around that college,” she said. “Getting an unbiased, neutral grand jury in that county just on face value would be extremely difficult. So if I had to pick a horse to bet on, it would be that one.”

Even if Judge rules in favor of the defense on any of its five arguments, the state’s prosecution of Kohberger is not going away, Elcox said.

“Even if they were successful, all is not said and done here,” she said. “Per the defense’s own request, their alternative remedy is to remand it for a preliminary hearing, which also is a probable cause hearing.”

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Caitlin Clark and Iowa find peace in the process

An Iowa associate professor breaks down the numbers to display Caitlin Clark's incredible impact on women's college basketball. (2:08)

ON A COLD, snowy Monday night in January, Caitlin Clark walked into a dimly lit restaurant in Iowa City and looked around the room for her parents. They smiled from a back table and waved her over. It was her 22nd birthday. Three teammates and the head Iowa Hawkeyes manager were with her, and soon everyone settled in and stories started to fly -- senior year energy, still in college and nostalgic for it, too.

That meant, of course, tales of The Great Croatian Booze Cruise.

In summer 2023, as a reward for their Final Four season, the Iowa coaches arranged a boondoggle of an international preseason run through Italy and Croatia, grown-ass women, pockets thick with NIL money to burn. They saw places they'd never seen, spoke strange languages and walked narrow cobblestone streets. "One of the best nights was when we got bottles of wine and just sat on the rooftop of the hotel," Caitlin said.

On the last free day of the trip, they proposed a vitally important mission to head manager Will McIntire, who now sat at the birthday table next to me.

They needed a yacht.

Like a real one, the kind of boat where Pat Riley and Jay-Z might be drinking mojitos on a summer Sunday. So McIntire found himself with the hotel concierge looking at photographs of boats. He asked Caitlin about the price of one that looked perfect.

"Book it right now," she said.

They climbed aboard to find a stocked bar and an eager crew. The captain motored them out to nearby caves off the coast of Dubrovnik where the players could snorkel and float on their backs and stare up at the towering sky. They held their breath and swam into caves. They looked out for one another underwater. When stories of the Caitlin Clark Hawkeyes are told years from now, fans will remember logo 3s, blowout wins and the worldwide circus of attention, but players on the team will remember a glorious preseason yacht day on crystal blue waters, a time when they were young, strong and queens of all they beheld. They'll talk about the color and clarity of the sea. A color that doesn't exist in Iowa. Or didn't until Caitlin Clark came along.

The Booze Cruise lived up to its name. After the stress of a Final Four run and the sudden rise of Caitlin's star, it was a chance to be a team and have nobody care and to care about nobody else. Many of their coaches didn't even find out about the yacht until the team got home.

"It was just what we needed," McIntire said at the birthday dinner table. It was the kind of night parents dream of having with their grown children. Often three conversations were going at once. Caitlin's dad, Brent, was telling McIntire about the wild screams and curses that come from their basement when one of their two sons is playing Fortnite.

"You should hear her play Fortnite," McIntire said, pointing to Caitlin.

"Is she good?" Brent asked.

"No," he laughed.

Caitlin told a story about her freshman year roommate almost burning the dorm down trying to make mac and cheese without water. She and Kate Martin told one about both of them oversleeping the bus at an away game -- they awoke to both their phones ringing and someone knocking on the door as they made eye contact and shouted "S---!" in unison.

There was one about Caitlin in full conspiracy-theory rage, too, convinced that Ohio State had falsified her COVID-19 test result to keep her out of a game.

"This is rigged!" she told her mom on the phone. "They're trying to hold me out!"

Anne took over the narration.

"Call the AD!" she said, imitating her daughter.

"I did not say that!" Caitlin said.

There was the time Caitlin needed to pass a COVID-19 test for games in Mexico. She showed up in the practice gym, throwing her mask on the ground while waving her phone and crowing, "I'm negative, bitches!" ... until one of her teammates looked at the email and realized Caitlin had read it wrong, so she quickly grabbed her mask and bolted. As the stories flew, Caitlin smiled, loving to hear her teammates, happy to be with them.

We raised glasses again and again, and her dad beamed. Her mom kept thanking her teammates for taking such good care of her. They toasted to Caitlin, to CC, to 22 and to Deuce-Deuce. The waitress brought over a framed collage she had made, along with a note thanking Caitlin for inspiring "girl power."

Caitlin's mom made a final toast.

"Happy birthday," she said.

"Happy birthday, Caitlin," Kate Martin said, turning to her left and asking her, "What was the best thing that happened in Year 21?"

Caitlin thought about it for a second.

"Final Four," she said.

Everyone clinked their glasses.

"Not even the booze cruise?" one of them asked.

They all laughed.

"Booze cruise!" everyone shouted.

MY INTRODUCTION TO Caitlin Clark's world began in September over breakfast with Hawkeyes associate head coach Jan Jensen, who grew up on an Iowa farm before building a basketball legend of her own.

We met at an old-guard Jewish deli while Jensen was on a brief Los Angeles recruiting trip, flying in from Alaska that morning and flying back home that night. We ogled the cake case with the towering meringue pompadours but settled on something healthy, along with about a million refills of coffee. Jensen held a cup in her hands and summed up the challenge now of being Caitlin Clark.

"She's figuring out how to really live with getting what she's always wanted," she said.

Jensen smiled before she continued.

"She wants to be the greatest that ever was."

She pointed at me as if to underline her meaning.

"I believe that in my heart," she said.

Jensen averaged 66 points a game in high school in the days when girls played 6-on-6. She is in Iowa's girls high school basketball Hall of Fame. Her grandmother, Dorcas Andersen Randolph, who went by "Lottie" because she scored a lot of points, is too. Jensen still has her uniform. She sees Caitlin standing on the shoulders of generations of women like Lottie.

She also understands Caitlin is standing on no one's shoulders.

"She's uncensored," Jensen said. "So many times women have to be censored."

Jensen leaned across the table again.

"There is something in her," she said. "Unapologetic."

To Jensen, Caitlin seems immortal; young, talented, dedicated, rich, famous and on the rise.

"She's 21," she said.

A magic age, her confidence and talent startling to older people like me and Jensen.

"Don't ever let anyone steal that from her," Jensen said. "Protecting that is the coach's job."

Jensen spoke with pride of Caitlin's 15 national awards, but she also said she is so talented, and driven, that she sometimes struggles to trust her teammates. This would be the work of this season and the epic battle of Caitlin's athletic life. She sees things other people do not see, including her teammates. She imagines what other people even in her close orbit cannot imagine, has achieved what none of them have achieved and has done so because she listens to the singular voice in her head and her heart. She must protect that and nurture it. At the same time, she is learning that her power grows exponentially when it lives in concert with other people. A great team multiplies her. A bad team diminishes her. The trust her coaches ask her to have in her teammates, especially new ones, comes with great personal risk. Believing in her coaches requires faith and courage. For their part, the Iowa coaches know that they are holding a rare diamond and are constantly reminding themselves their job is to polish, not to ask her to cut to their precise specifications. It's an effort, possession by possession, game by game, practice by practice, to meld two truths, to find the right balance, to elevate.

"It's a work in progress," Jensen said.

After last season's run to the NCAA title game, the Hawkeyes lost their star center, Monika Czinano, who's now playing pro ball in Hungary. She started every game Caitlin had ever played except one, and her dominance in the post taught Caitlin how successful teammates created space and opportunities at other spots on the floor. She still talks to Monika. Her trust in Monika's replacements is the Hawkeyes' most fragile place this year and will say a lot about whether this team can return to the Final Four.

"That's gonna be the struggle for her," Jensen said.

This idea would, in the coming five months, create two narratives for me, one public, one private, one about a superstar standing on center stage surrounded by an ever-growing mania, and another about a young woman trying to find herself, trying to decide how and who she wanted to be , in the center of that madness.

The waitress warmed up our coffee.

Jensen said she'd introduce me to Caitlin as soon as there was time in her schedule. Then she slipped out of our booth and headed out for a scouting visit at a nearby high school. I had a meeting with Priscilla Presley for another project later that day across town. We talked about life in the fishbowl with Elvis. She told me about how only a handful of memories remained hers alone even all these years later. I thought about Caitlin somewhere 30,000 feet in the air on a plane home from New York City after she received her final award of the 2023 season.

THIS IS A STORY about being 21. Do you remember turning 21?

At 18 you feel immortal but just three years later, a crack has opened in that immortality. You feel the gap between ambitions held and realized. You're aware that wanting things badly enough won't always be enough. You guard against bad energy and thoughts and hold fast to every ounce of confidence. That's when life really begins.

The size of Caitlin Clark's stage and the scale of her dreams and the reach of her talent leave little margin for error. She is chasing being the best of all time, which is an isolating thing. She isn't scared to voice her ambitions even when they separate her from the people she loves. Her teammates dream of merely making a WNBA roster. Kate Martin did the math for me one evening. There are 12 teams. Each team has 12 roster spots. College basketball might be a bigger public stage than the professional league, but it is much easier. The normal dream of a 21-year-old women's college basketball player, then, is the nearly impossible task of finding just one of 144 spots on a WNBA team, which has nothing to do with normal. A lofty dream might be to win one national award, not 15. When Caitlin gave her Associated Press Player of the Year trophy to her parents, her mom looked inside and gasped -- some of the metal on the inside was already peeling and rusting.

"What happened?" she asked Caitlin.

Caitlin shrugged sheepishly.

"The managers got it," she said.

It turns out the trophy, her mom said with a shake of the head, holds two beers. (Actually, the managers fact-checked -- it's two hard seltzers.) Caitlin is grateful for the awards but got tired of traveling around to get them, not because she didn't appreciate the attention but because she seemed to sense that her survival and continued success would depend in part on her closing the book on last season. The past is dangerous to an ambitious 21-year-old. It was a struggle to get her on the plane to New York City to accept the AAU's prestigious Sullivan Award. She asked whether it couldn't simply be mailed to her instead. In the end, she and her family had 12 hours in the city so she wouldn't miss any class. Michael Jordan talks about this -- the speed at which things come at you, the way, when you look back, it becomes hard to remember what happened where and when. That's Caitlin Clark's world right now, and inside she feels both like a superstar and like the little girl begging her father to expand the driveway concrete so she'd have a full 3-point line to shoot from. She references her childhood a lot in public, revealing comments hiding in the plain sight of news conferences and one-on-one interviews.

"I feel like I was just that little girl playing outside with my brother," she says.

The Clarks landed in New York and went straight to their hotel. Thirty minutes later, Caitlin hit the lobby dressed for the show. She signed autographs, posed for pictures, received the Sullivan Award, took more pictures, gave a speech and took more pictures. The family had just a few hours to sleep before heading to the airport for the flight home. But it was her first trip to New York City, and Caitlin said she wanted to see Times Square and get a slice of pizza. They went out and took a photograph, everyone together, then watched as Caitlin ordered a pepperoni slice, which arrived greasy on a stack of cheap paper plates. She folded it like a veteran. In the morning, they flew home. Caitlin rode with her headphones on. She likes Luke Combs. Turned up. Hearts on fire and crazy dreams. The next day she'd be at morning practice and then take her usual seat in Professor Walsh's product and pricing class.

IN MID-OCTOBER, I got to Iowa City in time for the second practice of the year. I ran into head coach Lisa Bluder in the elevator down to the Carver-Hawkeye practice gym, and she laughed about how two fans from Indiana just showed up at the first practice and were walking onto the court taking selfies. Bluder had to stop practice and politely ask, you know, what the hell? They explained they had traveled far to see Caitlin Clark in person.

At 8 a.m., practice began, and almost immediately Caitlin was vibrating with anger at the referees, who were actually team managers with whistles. The whole team looked out of sorts -- "little sh--s," one of their assistants called them during a water break -- and Caitlin fought her temper as several of her young teammates made mistakes. The main object of her scorn was a sophomore named Addison O'Grady , No. 44, who had become a bit of a punching bag. And all the while she raged at what she thought was the terrible job being done calling fouls and traveling.

"Stop letting him ref!" she barked to Jensen about a manager on the baseline. "He's not calling anything!"

She jacked up a 3.

"I don't love that 3," Bluder told her. "You were in range, no doubt. But you were not in rhythm and were contested."

Now Caitlin started talking to herself. What is the offense right now? This is a pretty regular thing, Caitlin Clark talking to Caitlin Clark, scolding her, cursing her, complaining to her, because who else could understand?

"Call screens," she muttered.

"We must call screens," Bluder yelled. "Somebody's gonna get hurt. Somebody's gonna get rocked."

Then Caitlin touched her leg gingerly, which set off a chain reaction of anxiety and hushed attention. She took herself out of an end-of-game drill to rest it. Then, unable to resist, ended up in the drill anyway.

At the end of practice, Bluder described the long road awaiting them if they wanted a return to the Final Four. The promised land, she called it. Everyone on the team knows that Caitlin has given all of them a challenge, yes, but also a gift. An opportunity to breathe rare air. Caitlin's best requires their best, and if they give it, they might just be able to beat anyone.

"Caitlin's got a hell of a lot of pressure," Bluder told them. "I get it."

But it was more than that.

"We are her," she said.

I MET WITH CAITLIN a few minutes later. We found some chairs in the Iowa film room.

"I'm trying to learn about myself as a 21-year-old," she said. "About how I react to situations, what I want in my life, what's good for me, what's bad for me."

The back wall of the film room featured larger-than-life portraits of the Hawkeyes, with Caitlin dominating the center of the collage. She gets the absurdity. Most every person walking around on the planet is a watcher. A consumer of the lives and adventures of others. Caitlin was like that, standing in line as a little girl to meet a hero like Maya Moore. In her bathroom at home in Des Moines she kept a caricature she got at an amusement park that shows her wearing a UConn uniform. But during last year's NCAA tournament, when she averaged 31.8 points and 10.0 assists in leading Iowa to the championship game, she became one of the watched .

"... and I'm 21 years old!" she said, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders with a grin, as if to say: Buy the ticket, take the ride.

"I don't f---ing know."

She's a household name now. Nike puts her on billboards like Tiger or Serena. She is the best women's college basketball player in the country, and one of the best college basketball players period . She has designs on best ever, a fraught thing to want. She admires Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, apex predators, and her ambition and talent live within her in equal measure alongside her youth and inexperience. She is striving for agency and intent in the glare of a white-hot spotlight. Luke Combs commented on her social media a few hours ago. She got free tickets and backstage passes to see him over the summer and also got tickets to Taylor Swift's "The Eras Tour." She invited the biggest Swifties on the team, trying to use her new superpowers for good. The Hawkeyes are forever asking her to DM their celebrity crushes and invite them to games. She laughs and tries to explain why she can't get Drake to Iowa City. A local newspaper reporter recently asked her about LSU's Angel Reese being in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit spread, a trap question asking her to comment on the marketability of their bodies.

She earns seven figures and has deals with Bose, Nike and State Farm. The Iowa grocery store chain Hy-Vee, another corporate partner, sometimes pays for her private security at public events.

Meanwhile, her mother still does her laundry.

"I'm trying to learn about myself," Caitlin repeated.

"At the same time I have to be the best version of myself. I have to be the best version of myself for my teammates, and for the fans, and for my family ... "

She laughed again.

"Yeah," she said, pausing to find the right words, feeling the weight of the coming season.

"Yeah," she said again.

Having been to the Final Four last year doesn't make another Final Four easier. It makes it harder. Fame is a warm saccharine glow that obscures the terminal velocity of expectation. "That adds to the tension," she said. "Every failure feels that much more intense. And every success also feels that much more intense. So it's about finding balance."

She sounded like an old soul, knowing how precious these days of glory are and how they are already slipping between her fingers. But that might just be because a middle-aged man was the one doing the listening. Most likely she is experiencing time in an altogether different way, so that right now, all at once, she is living with last year's almost , with this season's grind and hope, and with the knowledge that if everything goes right there is a future in which every year will be harder than the one before, and every season the watchers will be ready to replace last year's model with some newer, shinier object.

"When I leave this place, I don't want people to forget about me," she said.

THAT SAME MONTH, Brent and Anne Clark, who could only look at each other in wonder, parked in the West 43 lot next to the football stadium, where that afternoon their little girl would be playing an exhibition outdoors at Kinnick Stadium in front of the largest audience to ever watch a women's college basketball game.

"It's wild," they kept saying over and over.

"This is all she ever wanted!" Anne said as we set up the food and drinks. "She's asked for years: 'Can we please do a tailgate?'"

Brent stopped and listened to the band practicing inside the stadium. They played "Wagon Wheel." He found a spot where the sun felt warm on his face.

"So what's up with these sandwiches?" asked Caitlin's older brother Blake.

Her younger brother Colin hooked up the portable speaker. He's a freshman at Creighton, where he has found a community of his own. He and his sister adore each other. When he was a baby, the family called her "Caitie Mommy" because she took such good care of him, and now Brent and Anne love to see him celebrate her success. The first track he played was AC/DC's "Back in Black," the Hawks' football walkout song. Anne reached for a cardboard cutout of Caitlin's beloved golden retriever, Bella, a leftover from her freshman season when COVID-19 meant no fans in the seats.

Brent threw a football with one of the young family friends. Around him other fathers did the same with their sons and daughters, many of them wearing No. 22 jerseys, girls and boys.

"Look at all these little girls going in," Anne said.

Some football players walked through the parking lot, and nobody paid them much mind. Former Iowa and NFL star Marv Cook stood talking with Brent about Caitlin and her teammates when the football guys went past.

"They're not the only show in town anymore," Cook said.

The Clark car was packed with Hy-Vee fried chicken sandwiches, cookies, a cooler of beer and soda, these strange pickle-ham-cream cheese concoctions, the most Midwestern thing you've ever seen in your whole life -- "soooo gross!" Caitlin said later.

The lieutenant governor of Iowa stopped by to pay his respects.

"Hawk Walk!" he said.

Everyone went to form a line of cheering fans as the Iowa bus parked and the players went into the stadium. Anne Clark worked herself close holding up the cutout of Bella so Caitlin could see. One of the little girls next to Anne treated her like a Mama Swift sighting at a show.

"She touched me!" she screamed to her friends.

Caitlin went into the football locker room to get ready. Outside, the stadium pulsed with energy. Walter the Hawk swooped down from the press box. Then the dozens of speakers ringing the main bowl started thumping. "Back in Black" again. The whole place shook. Caitlin stepped into the light pouring into the mouth of the tunnel.

"I-O-W-A!" the crowd chanted.

"Let's hear it for No. 22, Caitlin Clark!" the announcer called.

Someone started an M-V-P chant.

The wind blew across the court. Caitlin even air-balled a free throw. Nobody cared. She got a triple-double. Stayed focused. With a minute left she threw a pass that center Addi O'Grady fumbled. Caitlin twirled around and hung her head but went back to her on the next possession.

The game ended in a blowout, and then Caitlin started working her way down the front row of the sideline, more than 50 yards of little girls and boys. They took selfies and asked her to sign their shirts. One young boy held a sign that said, "Met you at Hy-Vee."

"Thank you for coming!" Caitlin yelled.

As she finally ran into the tunnel, she jumped up and high-fived a young girl.

"No way!" the girl said.

Caitlin made it to the locker room, where she had stored a gift a very sick child had given her. The kid was a patient at the children's cancer ward across the street and was serving as an honorary captain. She'd had her own baseball card made, and on the back she'd been asked to name her favorite Hawkeye. Caitlin Clark, she said.

"I'll keep that forever," Caitlin said.

She left the stadium through a side door, got on the back of a golf cart with her boyfriend and headed to the basketball arena, where her parents waited with an enormous bag of freshly washed and folded clothes.

ONE MORNING LAST YEAR I drove across Des Moines to see where all this began. Although Caitlin hasn't been a student at Dowling Catholic for almost four years, her presence -- and her family's presence -- remains palpable in the halls. Her older brother won two state titles in football. Her younger brother won a state title in track. Caitlin's grandfather, her mom's dad, was the beloved football coach there for years. Once after an emotional game he gathered his team at midfield and burned Des Moines Register articles about his team he didn't like.

Caitlin comes by her fire honestly.

I parked and met the basketball coach, Kristin Meyer, in the lobby adjacent to the chapel. We walked through the library to her office. She told me a story that stuck with me. In 10th grade, Caitlin got a reading assignment about empathy. She didn't know what the word meant. Meyer tried and failed to explain. She realized then that she had a team of girls who wanted to enjoy playing sports -- "for fun," Caitlin would tell me later -- and one ponytailed Kobe Bryant.

The summer before her freshman season, the team went to a camp at Creighton. Caitlin threw a three-quarter-court bounce pass that hit a teammate in the hands. That same game, she bopped down the court and threw a perfect behind-the-back pass. Also in rhythm and on the money.

"I would go back and watch film and just rewind and watch again and watch again," Meyer said.

When Caitlin saw a player come open, or more often realized that a player would be coming open momentarily, look out! The ball was in the air and flying at their heads. This made her teammates nervous, and they'd shut down, which Caitlin didn't understand. Soon she just stopped passing.

"It was hard for her to understand what other people would feel," Meyer said.

Caitlin was, in real time, learning how to use her gift. This is an old story among basketball greats. Magic Johnson threw passes that even James Worthy couldn't catch. Caitlin's task was to see the gulf between her potential and her reality and close that distance. Often she got impatient. With herself and others. When someone made a mistake, or if she thought a referee or a coach was being unfair, she'd have tantrums. Mostly she seemed unaware of how her body language and mood impacted the people around her. She'd throw her arms in the air in disgust, or clap loudly, and waves of nervousness would pass through the team. Of course that cut both ways. When she praised a teammate, the coaches would see that player swell with pride. "If Caitlin gave me a compliment," one of her teammates said, "I felt like I was the best player in the gym."

Meyer started showing her film of her body language, something the Iowa coaches still do. They'd sit down and watch in silence as Caitlin stomped and gestured.

"High school basketball was honestly harder for me than college," Caitlin told me. "I mean that in the most positive, respectful way to my teammates. The basketball IQ wasn't there. At the end of the day they didn't care if we won or lost, really. It wasn't gonna affect their life that much. They just didn't get it on the same level."

Meyer watched a Bobby Knight video in which he called the bench the greatest motivator. That resonated. So when Caitlin would fire some wild shot she could see in her mind but not quite execute with her body, Meyer would sit her. Three times in high school Caitlin got technical fouls and she'd immediately come out, once for an entire quarter. As soon as she hit the chair she'd start agitating -- "Can I go back in?" "Can I go back in?!" "CAN I GO BACK IN?" -- until Meyer relented.

"When I used to get technical fouls in high school," Caitlin said, "I did not want to come out of the locker room after the game because I know my mom would be mad. But if I got one during an AAU tournament, I don't think my dad would tell my mom. He knew my mom would not be happy, but he understood it from a competitive standpoint."

Her dad played basketball and baseball in college. He sees a lot of himself in her.

"To her everything is a competition," Brent Clark said. "I was that way when I was her age. I was really ..."

He thought for a moment.

"Emotional," he said finally.

He wishes his own parents would have punished him more for his outbursts in youth sports. He remembers with shame crying in a dugout.

"I get her," he said. "I can relate. I see a lot of that fire. She's just much better at controlling it than I ever was."

Brent and Anne want most of all for Caitlin's spirit to never be squashed. Her grandfather the Dowling Catholic football coach used to say, "It's a lot easier to tame a tiger than it is to raise the dead."

Brent and I sat at a little sandwich place near his office, where he is a senior executive at an agricultural industrial parts company. He laughed talking about the Dowling Catholic Powder Puff girls' football game.

"What did she play?" I asked.

He looked at me like I was an idiot.

"Quarterback."

He laughed at the memory of taking Caitlin out in the back yard and watching her throw a perfect pass, a dart, 20 yards on the fly.

"You couldn't have thrown a better spiral."

Caitlin, like most children, watched her parents much more closely than they realized. "They balance each other really well," she said. "The biggest thing is he's always been a constant. I literally cannot say one time my dad has raised his voice at me. My mom is somebody I talk to every single day. My life would be a mess if it weren't for her. She's one of my best friends."

Caitlin led the state in scoring a couple of times, but Dowling never won a state title during her career. Her senior year the team didn't even make the state tournament. She could shoot the Maroons into games and sometimes out of them. But nobody worked harder in the gym. She wanted to be great. When someone got in the way of that, even if that someone was her, she struggled to manage her emotions. An engine as rare as hers threw out a ton of exhaust.

Caitlin and I talked about high school one morning. Both Jensen and Kate Martin told me they didn't think she had any true friends outside her tight-knit family before she got to Iowa. They didn't mean she wasn't popular, or didn't have a group to hang with, only that there was no one in her orbit who was wired like her. Legends like Tiger Woods and Joe DiMaggio often seemed alone too, even surrounded by huge crowds, solitary citizens living in a world of their own ambitions and fears.

"Were you lonely?" I asked.

She thought about it.

"I would say I was lonely in the aspect of no one understood how I was thinking," she said. "I wasn't surrounded by people who wanted to achieve the same things as me."

Letters from college coaches stacked up at her house in those days. Her parents kept them from her until late in the process, trying instinctively to protect as much of her childhood as they could. I think they knew even then. Her dream school was, like everyone else, UConn. She was growing up and learning for the first time about being watched, about reputation. A lot of college coaches watched the same body language sequences Meyer did. Most didn't mind. Dowling's open gyms filled with the best of the best coaches in the country. One absence was conspicuous, though.

"Geno never came," Meyer said.

CAITLIN'S FAMILY, IT'S important to note here, is quite Catholic. She went to Catholic school from kindergarten through graduation. Anne comes from a big, loud, fun Italian family, and if you look in Caitlin's fridge at the apartment she shares with teammate Kylie Feuerbach , you'll almost certainly find some frozen red sauce meals made by her mom or grandma.

Her brother Blake is always texting her reminders to say her rosary and go to the church near campus, conveniently located across the street from Iowa City's great dive bar, George's -- which is where Coach Bluder and her staff go to celebrate big wins. My friend Annie Gavin, whose father is the famous wrestling coach Dan Gable, goes to that church and reports that more Sundays than not, she sees Caitlin in the pews. Blake wore his St. Benedict bracelet to the Final Four last year and did four decades of his rosary at the hotel and the last round in the arena just before tipoff.

You see where this is going.

Anne Clark grew up the daughter of a Catholic high school football coach. What do you imagine she thinks is the greatest, most magical university in the world?

"For a while I thought she was gonna end up at Notre Dame," Meyer said.

Meyer told me that Caitlin remained pretty calm during her recruitment -- except when Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw came to town.

Her list of choices winnowed to two. The Hawkeyes and the Fighting Irish. She'd also looked at Iowa State, Texas and both Oregon schools. The lack of interest from UConn stung. "Honestly," she said, "it was more I wanted them to recruit me to say I got recruited. I loved UConn. I think they're the coolest place on Earth, and I wanted to say I got recruited by them. They called my AAU coach a few times, but they never talked to my family and never talked to me."

Bluder and Jensen had been worried about the Irish from the beginning. Jensen got to Brent Clark when Caitlin was in the seventh grade and told him they'd offer her a scholarship right now. Then she promised to stay away until he was ready to talk. She also predicted exactly how the rest of the nation would awake to the magic of his daughter, which gave her credibility as the years went on.

When Caitlin was playing in Bangkok with Team USA in 2019, Jensen and Bluder flew to games around the world so Caitlin could see they made the effort.

"My family wanted me to go to Notre Dame," Caitlin said. "At the end of the day they were like, you make the decision for yourself. But it's NOTRE DAME! 'Rudy' was one of my favorite movies. How could you not pick Notre Dame?"

Everyone in her high school wanted her to choose Notre Dame. Every year the top two or three students went to South Bend. It was ingrained in the culture. When she went on a campus visit, she wanted to love it. In fact, she got frustrated with herself for not loving it.

Notre Dame it would be. She called McGraw. It was the "smart" choice.

Next she called Bluder to break the bad news.

Bluder was at a field hockey game.

She stepped away from the field and called her staff.

"We're not gonna get her," she said.

Then the Iowa coaches waited for the dagger of an official announcement. For some reason it never came. Jensen had seen second-guessing before. She texted Caitlin's assistant AAU coach to see if it would be appropriate for her to reach out.

"I think I'd call her if I were you," the coach told Jensen.

So she did.

"What's up?"

"I haven't seen anything."

"Yeah, I've changed my mind."

Caitlin wanted to come to Iowa but thought her mom didn't want her to turn down Notre Dame. The AAU coach called Bluder and asked if Caitlin were to change her mind, would there be a spot for her. Three or so days later Caitlin again faced two phone calls. The first was terrifying. She needed to tell McGraw she had changed her mind.

"I'm 17 years old," she said, "and I'm sitting in my room and I'm sweating my ass off. I'm about to call her. She is an intimidating individual. She was really understanding. She kinda knew. She was great. Then I called Coach Bluder."

Dave and Lisa Bluder sat in the cozy basement of a fancy local restaurant. A fireplace warmed the room. They'd just sat down and ordered a drink.

"I can remember the exact table," Bluder said.

Her phone rang.

"Do you have a few minutes to talk?" Caitlin asked.

She committed on the spot. Bluder went back inside and ordered a bottle of champagne. Then she and Dave got another bottle and caught a ride to Jensen's house to celebrate some more. Caitlin remained in her bedroom, still nervous. She had made her two calls, but there was one more person who needed to know the news.

"Caitlin commits to us but didn't tell her mom," Jensen said laughing.

Her parents both call the family meeting that followed "emotional" and say they realized, truly in that moment, that their daughter had a vision for herself more ambitious and nuanced than any they could conjure. She seemed vulnerable and brave, and they deferred to her judgment.

Caitlin Clark was going to be a Hawkeye, and she told reporters her goal was to take Iowa to the Final Four. Some people rolled their eyes, but a bar had been set. Caitlin and I talked about this moment, the way that it felt like part of her search was to find other young women who cared about the game as much as she did. I asked her if this moment felt like the first decision she'd made completely herself.

"For sure," she said.

I asked if this was also the first time she had ever defied her mother, whom she adores -- a critical step on the path from childhood to adulthood. She stopped cold. It seemed like she'd never really thought about it before but now saw it clearly, from the high ground of the life she has built from talent and desire.

"Probably," she said finally.

THESE DAYS CAITLIN and her teammates travel around Iowa City in a pack, a tight-knit crew, as her celebrity pushes them further and further into their insular little world, which revolves around the riverside apartment complex where most of them live. They know everything about each other -- such as, say, that Caitlin's fake name for orders and hotel rooms is Hallie Parker from "The Parent Trap" -- and this past Halloween, they dressed in costumes and climbed up balconies to sneak into teammates' apartments to scare each other. Sydney Affolter nearly had a heart attack when she approached her sliding balcony door to find, staring at her, a full gorilla costume with a giddy Kate Martin inside.

These women are Caitlin's tribe, and they have been since she arrived on campus in fall 2020. The starting five for the first game of her career was the same as the starting five in the national championship game three years later. Monika Czinano, the center, a dominant force on the court, with a quirky Zen off it. "Well, I live on a floating rock," she'd say with a shrug after a tough loss. McKenna Warnock holding down the 4 with physicality and smarts, and Gabbie Marshall playing alongside with power and finesse. Caitlin ran point from her very first practice, while Martin began to shape the whole team in her competitive image, the daughter of a high school football coach who brought intensity to every part of the game.

"What she found is people who also put their entire life into basketball," Martin said.

Caitlin's teammates meanwhile discovered her talent came with impatience and temper. She blew up at practice. A lot of throwing her hands up in the air, stomping off the court and simply refusing to pass the ball to an open teammate if she didn't believe they'd deliver. It was the first time in her life she'd had to play with teammates who would not simply be run over. Warnock got in her face. So did Martin. The coaches pulled her aside. She's open. You have got to pass her the ball. Caitlin's answer, like a logical toddler, left them stuttering to find a response. Why would I pass her the ball when I'm taking more shots in the practice gym?

"I had expectations of them and they weren't meeting them," Caitlin said.

Because of COVID-19, all this occurred in private in the early days. A lot of the freshman year dust-ups happened in empty arenas. Her teammates came to understand that they were dealing with someone like Mozart. She wasn't rude, nor necessarily nice, just a different species. At one point that year a sports psychologist came in to work with the team. She started going around the room and asking the players when they felt stressed and anxious and how they reacted to those feelings. One by one, the young women described familiar symptoms and scenarios: sweaty hands, a fear of the free throw line, struggling with breathing, anxiety about the last possession.

Finally it was Caitlin's turn. She seemed a little embarrassed.

"I never am," she said.

Everyone in the room somehow understood she was being more vulnerable than cocky.

"Stone cold," one witness told me. "It was so cool."

I pressed her once on how she must have seemed to her teammates that first year. "People know I'll have their backs and I'll ride for them every single day," she said. "Obviously there is a switch that flips when I step on the court like I want to kill someone. I'm here to cause havoc. Some of the biggest challenges are I have all this emotion, I'm a freshman and I'm starting and how do I channel this? At times they were definitely like, 'Why is this girl a psycho?'"

The Hawkeyes lost games they should have won that year, still figuring out a way to have both a team and a superstar. The coaches put together video sessions completely devoted to her reactions. They had few notes about her actual play. She simply moved at warp speed, and even her most gifted teammates needed time to adjust. To learn how to breathe her air, to speak her language, to cross dimensions from their old world into the new one she was creating.

"If you see a practice, you might figure that out," Jensen told me once. "You gotta have whatever that is. You gotta be playing the game at Caitlin's pace. It's all processing. She's a half-second ahead."

The coaches saw her learning, too, looking to pass out of double- and triple-teams. Bluder kept telling them to give her latitude. Their main job, as she saw it, was to make sure they never put "her light under a bushel."

One day last year I sat down with Jensen to watch film of Caitlin's outbursts, which they had put together in reels.

"She does a lot of twirling," Jensen said with a sigh.

A twirl, a stomp off the court, slamming her hands into a wall. A reaction when the mistake was someone else's and not often enough a "my bad" when it was hers.

"She's not touchy-feely," Jensen said. "You're gonna meet her where she is."

The Iowa coaches didn't baby their prodigy. After one particularly bad performance, Caitlin caught a full barrage of anger and blame in the postgame locker room. She took it in public, but when she got into the car with her mom, she burst into tears. Not because of the yelling but because she wondered if she wanted something different than everyone else around her.

"Our goals are not aligned," she told her mom.

The Hawkeyes won 20 games and lost 10 her freshman year. They got beat in overtime at home by Ohio State. They beat No. 7 Michigan State in the Big Ten tournament. Caitlin won national co-freshman of the year. That helped with credibility.

"I want her in my foxhole," Martin said. "That's the type of player you want at the end of a game in a battle."

Maybe earlier than anyone, Martin realized that Caitlin's emotional outbursts were a byproduct of a young woman trying to marshal forces too powerful to fully control. Caitlin could take them to glory if they could help her be her best self. They all needed one another. Her teammates' understanding grew. They saw her get the blame for all the losses and knew the ball would always be in her hands with the game on the line. At a team meeting that season, when hurt feelings over Caitlin's lack of trust had come to the surface, it was Martin who rose to speak.

"I got something," she said.

The team fell silent.

"Everybody thinks they want to be Caitlin," she said. "I don't know if you want to be Caitlin."

The women knew immediately what she meant.

"The crown she wears is heavy."

The other four starters slowly accepted their role as The Caitlinettes. They won two games in the NCAA tournament before getting beat in the Sweet 16 by UConn. The headlines the next day back in Iowa would ratchet up the pressure -- Are the Hawks Ahead of Schedule? -- but in the postgame chaos Caitlin saw a familiar face approaching. It was Geno Auriemma. He told her how great she'd played and thanked her for her contribution to their sport. It felt like a victory. He finally saw what Bluder had seen all along. "He could see the greatness in me when I was a freshman," she said, "before everything unfolded when I was a junior."

That offseason Caitlin tried out for Team USA. Possession to possession, shot to shot, she played free and bold. Head coach Cori Close, whose day job was coaching the UCLA Bruins , saw the confidence immediately. "Women have been socialized to not want to take all the shine," she said. "She is an elite competitor who isn't scared to step into the moment."

But every team Caitlin had been on during the tryouts had lost its scrimmage, and after tryouts Close pulled her aside and put a question to her simply: "Do you want to be a really talented player who gets a lot of stats, or do you want to win?"

Caitlin made the roster, led the team to gold and was named MVP. "To Caitlin's credit, she really bought into that," Close said. "She went from being a really, really talented competitor to a winner."

WITHIN DAYS OF my arrival inside the Iowa basketball program, I started hearing stories about The Scrimmage. It seemed mythical the way the managers talked about it, but it really happened, on Oct. 20, 2021, just 15 days before the start of Caitlin's sophomore season.

"I watched it with my own two eyes!" former manager Spencer Touro said.

"The one where I went insane?" Caitlin asked.

"I think she made like five 3s in a row," Bluder said.

"I remember the scrimmage," Kate Martin said.

"How'd you hear about that?" Caitlin asked.

"I would get caught just watching her," Martin said.

"Down 25 with four minutes left," Jensen said.

"I had 22 points in less than two minutes," Caitlin said.

"She had seven 3s and a floater to tie at the buzzer," Jensen said.

"That's when I think she started to expand her game to the deep logos," Bluder said.

"There are clips," Caitlin said.

"It's a video game when she's on," Jensen said as she cued up silent footage from the actual scrimmage.

"I just start launching," Caitlin said.

"This is ... ," and Jensen starts laughing and can't stop.

"Trading 3 for 2," Caitlin said. "They're missing everything."

"... it's crazy," Jensen said, regaining her composure, watching Caitlin hit a 2, a 3, a 2 with an and-1, then another 3.

"I am making one-legged floaters," Caitlin said.

"Another off-balance 3," Jensen said, watching Caitlin grin on the film.

"She would take a couple of dribbles from half court," manager Isaac Prewitt said at a local campus restaurant over a plate of boneless wings.

"Everyone was freaking out," manager Will McIntire said, before taking a bite of his buffalo chicken wrap.

"They're going full tilt on her," Prewitt said. "They're not holding back."

"After I made my fifth 3 in a row, I ran to the bench," Caitlin said.

"You just have to let your jaw hit the floor," McIntire said.

"She's smiling now," Jensen said. "She knows."

"What is happening?" Caitlin screamed to her teammates on the bench.

"Look at the bench," Jensen said as she watched Caitlin scream at them and her teammates screaming back.

"I rarely do that," Caitlin said a little sheepishly.

"Now we're down three with 16 seconds left," Jensen said.

"Coach Abby was dying laughing," Caitlin said.

"So that tied it," Jensen said and the film finally ended, evidence that the birth of the legend really happened, was an actual thing, that none of the people in the gym that day will ever forget. Including a team of young girls who'd been invited to see a practice and happened upon the wildest one ever.

"They were going insane," Caitlin said.

"We're on the other side," McIntire said. "We are all like, oh my god."

"The coaches were just like, what the f---," Caitlin said.

Those few minutes changed the Iowa program forever. These Hawkeyes had been picked by the basketball gods to take part in something rare, something that would define them, that would be a legacy. That season they trailed by 25 points late in the third quarter against Michigan. Iowa dressed only seven players because of injuries.

Then Caitlin started firing wild, fearless 3-pointers. She made one from the logo, and during a subsequent timeout the team gathered in an excited circle around Bluder. Sharon Goodman leaned in.

"It's just like that scrimmage!" she said.

In the final six minutes, Caitlin hit four 3-pointers, scored 21 points and pulled the No. 21 Hawkeyes within five with 1:05 to go. The run stalled and the No. 6 Wolverines escaped with a win, but Iowa headed home in a kind of euphoria. The team could see the future. Weather delayed the team's flight and the players spread out around Signature Flight Service at the Willow Run private airport as highlights from the game played on every screen. Social media exploded. Caitlin Clark had just taken over a game, turning a Big Ten hostile arena into her cul-de-sac back in Des Moines.

The secret was out.

The Hawkeyes sat, just them, in a little pilot's waiting room with big recliners. Everyone groaned when ESPN aired her lone air ball. Caitlin sank into the cushions. She felt it, too. Friends and family kept sending her clips from the game as those same clips played on the three screens on the wall. She'd watched the "SportsCenter" top 10 her whole life and now she was on it. It felt like a moment. Not a mountaintop but proof to each of them that the ascent was real, that Caitlin really was stretching the canvas, exploding the usual logic about what was possible on a court and what was not. Maybe everything they thought they knew about basketball and the confines of 94 feet by 50 feet was wrong. Maybe the sophomore sitting in the oversized recliner was simultaneously breaking and remaking it.

THAT BRINGS ME to the other, inevitable remaking of her world that happened during her sophomore year. Talent like hers comes with a cost and, in our culture currently, that cost is fame. One night Iowa played a home game. Caitlin's parents, like always, drove over and cheered from the stands -- and nervously said rosaries, and screamed at officials, and paced, and switched seats if some bad energy had somehow infected their previous seating pattern -- and when the game ended, they rushed to the car to get home. Caitlin showered and changed and, close to 11 p.m., finally headed from the arena to her car. She was by herself. Two strange men approached through the shadows. Her pulse quickened.

They wanted her to sign some memorabilia.

The encounter freaked her out a little but freaked her parents out a lot, so they got with the university to work out a security plan. Looking back, Brent Clark said, they didn't understand at all what was about to happen. A legend was being born, one of those folk heroes who can only really exist in college sports: Steve McNair, Marcus Dupree, Tim Tebow, Caitlin Clark.

Fans around the conference loved to heckle her. She secretly loved the hostility because it made her games feel like the ones she'd watched on television as a child with her parents and brothers. Bluder said one Big Ten coach shouted at Caitlin during a game, "You're not as good as you think you are!"

"Were you nuclear?" I asked.

"I still am."

The Iowa coaches made progress with the body language in practice, and even if she couldn't exactly control her fiery side, Caitlin did know enough to recognize it in herself. She was becoming self-aware, learning how to maximize her unique combination of skill and drive. One day Jensen pulled up a body language clip that showed her simmering, clearly frustrated, but managing not to explode. There were victories to celebrate. The Hawkeyes won the 2022 Big Ten title and went into the tournament with high hopes, but in the second round they lost to Creighton. Blake Clark texted a photograph of the scoreboard to his sister. Motivation. All offseason, at random moments, he'd send the picture again.

"She eats that stuff up," Blake said.

LAST SEASON, CAITLIN'S junior year, arrived with enormous expectations, and she felt them. The starting five had started two full years of games together, two years of practices and team parties and late-night flights and bus rides. This was their last year together. Monika Czinano would head to the WNBA or overseas to continue her career, and McKenna Warnock was about to graduate on her pre-dentistry path and start applying to dental schools. This was Caitlin's best shot to deliver on her bold claim that they would reach the Final Four.

Before the season began, the Iowa coaches reached out to a performance consultant and author whom Caitlin had studied in high school. Brett Ledbetter first Zoomed with her on a Monday, the last week of July, and they started with the idea that the search for approval can get supercharged by her growing fame and success. Praise is a gateway drug, he told her. She talked about how she'd become addicted without even realizing what was happening.

"It really is a drug," she told him. "You're always craving it."

"How do you process what you just said?" he asked.

"I think it's scary to think about," she said.

"I think it's sad."

Two weeks later they Zoomed again. The topic was "unconditional peace," and she talked about her desire to be calm. She wanted to know which external forces made her feel full and which made her feel empty. Later she'd watch that video back with Ledbetter and find herself second-guessing her answers.

"Because?" he asked.

"I don't want to say the wrong thing," she told him. "And maybe I don't even really understand yet."

"Understand what?"

"What I'm chasing after."

There was a preseason practice on Oct. 15 when she pouted and raged. That went into the clip file. The coaches still prepared video packages of her body language and reactions. But these moments had softened, and slowed, and when confronted with them, her answers showed her growing ability to harness her gift. Bluder showed her one moment from practice when she just walked off the court into the tunnel and vanished.

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" the coaches asked.

"It's good," Caitlin told them.

She told her coaches that she'd felt herself about to explode and decided to have a second alone, so that she didn't negatively impact her teammates.

"I didn't slam the chair," she told them.

They liked that. She liked that they liked it.

"I didn't throw my water bottle," she told them.

They liked that, too.

"I walked away," she said, and then smiled and added, "I didn't even scream in there."

THE SEASON BEGAN and Iowa got upset on the road at K-State, then lost to UConn at a tournament in Oregon and to NC State at home. The previous year's NCAA loss to Creighton weighed heavy and all she could think about was the specter of failure hanging over this season, and her career, and over the success of her decision to choose Iowa over Notre Dame, and just a lot of other unfocused, swirling anxiety.

"What if we get upset again?" Caitlin thought.

She needed help with the chaos of living in multiple dimensions of time, juggling past, present and future all at once, with tomorrow offering the circle's second chance but also arrows from the battlement walls.

"I'm almost playing this game because I have this expectation of all I want to accomplish," she'd say later, "but I'm missing the moments in between. I've got to find peace in my life."

The Iowa coaches encouraged her to "take off her cape" in front of her teammates. That would deepen their connection, which they'd need to win the close, fierce games that loomed for the Hawkeyes. Once a week, the players met to talk honestly about their hopes and fears. "Those were highly classified conversations," Ledbetter said, "and nothing was off the table. It was remarkable where they went as a group together. One of the things she embraced is vulnerability. The way she viewed vulnerability changed in the course of the season."

He asked her to smile at people first and see how that changed the energy in the room. She did and reported back. Everyone seemed happier and friendlier and more secure. These moments weren't tied to what she could accomplish but to how she showed up in the world with and for others. The rest of the country would discover Caitlin in the coming months, seeing her emerge almost fully formed as a superstar, but her teammates were watching from the front row as she built an interior mental warrior strong enough to support the weight of her talent and the expectations it brought.

Internal motivations to be the best and external motivations to reach records and milestones, to win, to earn praise and approval, overlapped for Caitlin. Each one feeding the other. She'd trapped herself in a perpetual state of chasing, where achievements brought no peace. Her coaches and mentors helped her see the lie in those dreams. The numbers, great as they were, fun as they have been to chase, weren't speaking to her soul, weren't why she played. The encouragement and praise, from fans, coaches, teammates, friends and her parents, were a sign she was doing something at a very high level but were never enough for her to feel as if she had arrived.

"You just want more of it," she said.

"That's not going to make me feel full at the end of the day," she said during another session. "In 20 years, banners and rings just collect dust. It's more the memories."

Caitlin settled on a mantra: Find peace in the quest.

IN THE FINAL regular-season game of the 2023 season, No. 2-ranked Indiana came to Carver-Hawkeye Arena. This night would let Iowa know if it'd come together in time to make a run, and would let Caitlin know if all the hard mental and emotional work she'd put in -- in addition to all the hours in the gym and weight room, where she complained to the strength coaches that they had made her thighs get too big for all her jeans -- would result in a player and a team functioning at the same frequency. She'd worked to find peace, and tonight that meant peace inside an arena that experienced Hawk fans insist they've never heard louder.

Iowa jumped out to a 10-2 lead with a 3-pointer by Kate Martin that ripped through the net so clean and so hard the television audience could hear the popping strings. Indiana fought back. Caitlin hit a big shot and pounded her chest and she stomped to her own bench and bellowed. Her teammates shouted back. The game was tied late when the Hoosiers went to the line with less than a second left and two foul shots to take the lead. Caitlin started yelling at the officials to review the clock.

"Time! Time! Time!"

She alone realized that the officials had messed up the clock. That's the basketball IQ coaches are forever talking about. She stayed calm and the officials went to check the replay monitors and sure enough, she was right.

The referees fixed the clock. Indiana made both free throws to take a two-point lead. The Hawkeyes had a full second and a half to get off a buzzer-beater.

The No. 2 team in the country got in its defensive set.

It was time.

Caitlin rushed toward a screen at the top of the key, the clock almost out, and every one of the 15,000 people in this storied old arena knew she was taking the last shot. Her opponents knew it, too. The pass came in. The clock started: 1.5 seconds, 1.4, 1.3. Off balance but with a smooth flick of the wrist, fingers pointed toward the floor, she fired the last shot of the game. The ball dropped and the arena exploded with sound. The noise overwhelmed the television microphones into a slush of feedback. Kate Martin doubled over in awe and jubilation and Caitlin took off sprinting for the baseline just like in practice.

Iowa won three straight games to win the Big Ten tournament, beating Ohio State in the final by 33 points. Caitlin felt invincible. Her brother Blake told me one night, almost in awe, that his sister has the rare thing that powered Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. "One of her superpowers is taking things personally," he said. "The fact that you're on a basketball court with her, that's a challenge. 'You should leave this court knowing you have no right to be on it. You need to go home and go work if you want to share the court with me and my team.' That's why you see her smiling as she is absolutely dismantling Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game, just cackling as she's coming up the floor with the ball. Because it's so easy and it's just basketball."

The next morning, back in Iowa City, Caitlin got up early and decided to attend her 8 a.m. class. She'd missed a few. Once all the students had taken their seats, the professor looked out into the crowd.

"Is Caitlin Clark here?"

She was sitting in the back row. The students turned to look her way. They started clapping, the room soon echoing with cheers.

The NCAA committee gave the Hawkeyes a No. 2 seed.

THREE YEARS OF WORK with her Iowa teammates, and a lifetime of dreaming before arriving on campus, had placed Caitlin Clark on the biggest stage in her sport with the exact right combination of ruthlessness, talent and desire to make that stage her own. Athletes dream of peaking at the perfect moment and soon the entire country would know what the Hawkeyes first learned in that long ago scrimmage. She wanted her moment. She made her intentions for March known when Bluder subbed her out of the first-round blowout win against Southeastern Louisiana. Furious, she stomped past her coach on the way to the bench.

"Forty minutes, six games," she barked.

That was it: 40 minutes in a game, six games for the championship.

The second round scared them all. The Georgia Bulldogs were coming to Carver-Hawkeye. They played physical SEC basketball. Caitlin told me she hadn't felt this much pressure all season. They'd lost the year before in the round of 32 to Creighton. Blake had been sending Caitlin the scoreboard picture for a whole year. The Bulldogs played a funky matchup zone that caused problems for opponents. Iowa got off to a slow start but found its rhythm. The game stayed close, as close as four points in the final minute. The Bulldogs kept fouling hard, playing with intensity, trying to stay in the game. During a television timeout, Caitlin stood next to the referee waiting to restart play. The ref held the ball, and a Georgia defender stood next to them.

"You're not as good as you think," the Bulldogs player said.

Caitlin smiled and turned to the ref.

"Do you think I'm a good basketball player?"

The referee started laughing. The Iowa coaches knew, in that moment, that she had entered chrysalis stage. She'd become the player she had always had the potential to be. Calm, ruthless. A winner. She simply would not engage with the negativity. She hit two foul shots with a second left and the game was over.

Bluder told her team to pack for two games in Seattle, and then for two games in Dallas at the Final Four. The Hawkeyes were not going home. They flew into Seattle and walked into the hotel where the players saw a DJ booth set up in the lobby. Caitlin pulled her hood up and went up and pretended to be spinning records in a club and everyone laughed.

"Oh my god, this kid," Iowa staff member Kathryn Reynolds said with a wistful laugh. "We were on the ride of our lives."

She grinned on the bus to and from practice and scrolled through pictures of her dog, Bella. In the Sweet 16, she scored 31 in an easy win against Colorado. The managers still talk about that game, which is often overlooked in the run of clutch performances that would follow.

"She just took it over," manager Prewitt said. "It was nuts. She has that ability to flip that switch."

"Can you tell when it's coming?" I asked.

McIntire just nodded.

"Honestly as someone who guards her," he said, "it's the look she gets and the way she starts dribbling the ball. Her mojo. Her body language."

"If someone gets up on her and talks s---," Prewitt said.

"You just get a tingle," McIntire said. "OK. Some s--- is about to go down."

He laughed.

"Usually it's against us during practice," he said.

The morning of the Elite Eight, facing fifth-seeded Louisville, Reynolds, who was basically Caitlin's chief of staff to help her navigate stardom, ran into her after the morning shootaround.

"How do you feel?" Reynolds asked.

Caitlin just shrugged her shoulders.

"I feel good," she said.

Reynolds said she knew then that Iowa would win.

"You can read her eyes really well," she said. "She has it all in her face. She was just in this different space. I remember the peace during shootaround, goofy then focused. It was almost bizarre to watch how comfortable she seemed."

Caitlin believed it was the biggest game of her life.

She walked onto the court and felt no nerves or anxiety.

I must've raised an eyebrow or something when she told me that because she smiled and said, "I swear to God I would tell you."

She walked up to Reynolds.

"This is gonna be a great game," she told her. "This is gonna be awesome."

Caitlin stepped into the spotlight, famous for the first time from coast to coast, drawing record audiences to the broadcasts. In the first quarter of the Elite Eight game against Louisville, she went on fire. Hit a 3. Iowa got a stop. Hit another 3. After a turnover Caitlin pushed a 2-on-1 fast break across the center line. Once there would have been no scenario in which she didn't try to score. But she'd been trying to listen to her coaches telling her that real life cannot be lived in a total isolation. She needed to share. The defender closed, perfectly lured to get left flat-footed by a patented Caitlin juke, but instead she threw a long bounce pass that hit McKenna Warnock perfectly in stride but bounced off her hands and out of bounds. The roof would have lifted off the building had the pass led to an easy bucket. It looked, honest to goodness, like a pass Magic Johnson might have thrown in the early summer of 1988, but it earned the Hawkeyes no points. The cameras focused on Caitlin, who did not react at all. Her coaches all noticed.

During a run in the next quarter she attracted a double-team and dished to a wide-open Warnock for 3 on two consecutive game-busting possessions. Iowa never trailed again. Warnock pointed at Caitlin as they turned and ran back on defense. During the timeout that followed, Louisville coach Jeff Walz ranted and raved and screamed in the face of one of his guards like a toddler, and that's what a confident Caitlin Clark can do to a grown man: turn him into a joke of a child, red-faced, all screams and no plan to make the bleeding stop. The Hawkeyes took the lead and then went on a 9-0 run in the second quarter. Caitlin scored or assisted on every one of the points. When Iowa won she ran to Bluder and wrapped her up in a hug.

"We did it," Caitlin said.

She finished with 41 points. She had 12 assists and 10 rebounds, a triple-double, just owning the game and the vibrating electrons that created the spaces in it. The Hawkeyes were going to the Final Four.

ON THE DAY of the national semifinal against South Carolina, Caitlin watched some video of her pouting through a practice back on Oct.15. She didn't recognize that old version of herself and felt like she'd braved the storms of the season and postseason and had emerged stronger. She walked onto the court and heard the 19,288 fans screaming, faced into that noise like a physical thing. Something almost metaphysical happened to her. Even six months later she still struggled to believe it happened. But when she first stepped onto the court before that South Carolina game, she felt like she left one dimension behind and moved into another. She told herself that she'd worked so hard for this moment and it was now hers to own. Most of all she felt peace in the quest. Only a few rhythm masters ever reach that state of elevated consciousness. Everyone who tastes it wants more, their eyes opened to new worlds of color.

Iowa upset the undefeated, top-seeded and defending champion Gamecocks 77-73. Caitlin scored 41 points including five 3-pointers. She showed heart in the tense moments. Afterward, in a room waiting on the press to come ask her questions, she shared a private moment with Bailey Turner, the sports information director. He described her later as completely calm, empty and peaceful.

The Hawkeyes lost in the title game to LSU.

The LSU coaches had given the Tigers a devastatingly accurate scouting report on the Hawkeyes. Associate head coach Bob Starkey wrote that Caitlin would score her points and there was nothing they could do to stop her. The key was to manage how she scored those points. She averaged 27 in the Iowa wins and 30 in the losses. The key to beating the Hawkeyes, Starkey argued, was stopping Monika Czinano, who scored 19 when her team won but only 11 when they lost.

Against LSU she scored 13 and fouled out. McKenna Warnock fouled out, too. Caitlin scored 30 in the defeat.

She went to a little room beneath the arena for a news conference.

Someone asked her, "What's next for this team?"

She tried not to laugh. This question landed in her deepest anxieties. She'd been trying to face down the fear that nothing she ever did would be good enough and now here was proof that someone else thought that, too. She wanted to make time stop. Tomorrow, with its hope and danger, loomed always. Peace felt more and more like the ability to keep tomorrow out of today.

"I don't want to think about what's next," she said once. "I don't want to feel like I always have to do more and be more."

Months later, as we talked about the Final Four, I asked her if she felt like she knew herself.

"That's a journey I'm still on," she said.

She smiled.

"I'm only 21," she said.

This is a story about being 21.

"You're trying to know yourself," she said, "while you're trying to become this great person."

MODERN FAME IS a radioactive thing that corrodes everything it touches and consumes some people completely. Human beings are designed to live in small tribes, where the most important part of everyday life revolves around direct interactions. That vital way of being is undercut again and again by fame. It really messes some people up. Caitlin has been fighting to feel and be and be seen as human since high school, even as she has strived for things that can only be described as superhuman.

After Georgia and Colorado got chippy, especially when Caitlin would go on a run of logo 3s, her confidant Kathryn Reynolds told her that only she had control of her mind and that nobody could break through that barrier without her permission. She had the power to keep them at bay.

Against Louisville in the Elite Eight, Caitlin hit her sixth 3-pointer and then waved her hand in front of her face, an imitation of wrestler John Cena's can't-see-me move. It was a spontaneous nod to Reynolds' advice. Cena almost immediately tweeted at her. So did LeBron James, who called Caitlin "so COLD!" More people tuned in to ESPN to see Iowa play Louisville than had watched any regular-season NBA game on the network all season.

When LSU beat Iowa in the title game, star center Angel Reese, an intense, talented player who had 15 points and 10 rebounds in the win, made the can't-see-me gesture back at Caitlin as the clock wound down. Postgame social media lit up, some criticizing Reese for showing up an opponent, others saying that kind of criticism showed a racial double standard.

Earlier on Final Four weekend, Lisa Bluder had spoken of the competitiveness she anticipated in the semifinal against South Carolina by saying the game would be a bar fight. After the loss, Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley objected to ways she said her team had been characterized all season.

"We're not bar fighters. We're not thugs. We're not monkeys. We're not street fighters. This team exemplifies how you need to approach basketball."

The moments all intersected in the days after the tournament ended. The semiotics of race and the fires of fighting to win fueled each other. Tough talk between two elite head coaches opened onto difficult public conversations about the consequences of language. And on-court gestures from one superstar to another were interpreted by some as clashes between identities that extended beyond the game.

Even if they could see you...they couldn't guard you! Congrats on the historic performance @CaitlinClark22 and to @IowaWBB on advancing to the Final Four! @MarchMadnessWBB #WFinalFour https://t.co/QvpYDTESwb — John Cena (@JohnCena) March 28, 2023

In her postgame news conference, Reese said: "All year I was critiqued about who I was. I don't fit the narrative. I don't fit in the box that you all want me to be in. I'm too hood. I'm too ghetto. You all told me that all year. But when other people do it, you all don't say nothing."

When Iowa got home from the Final Four, Turner, the sports information director, arranged an interview for Caitlin with ESPN. Caitlin thought the questions would focus on the Wooden Award, which she had just won, but they were mostly about the end of the championship game.

"Angel is a tremendous, tremendous player," she said. "I have nothing but respect for her. I love her game.

"I think everybody knew there was going to be a little trash talk the entire tournament. It's not just me and Angel. I don't think she should be criticized."

The stakes of playing on the stage Caitlin and Angel play on are high, and they know it. "Facts," Caitlin told me later.

When the TV interview ended, she started shaking uncontrollably.

"I'm doing this in my apartment bedroom," she said.

She texted her mom and Bluder and asked how she'd done. Both told her she'd done great.

"If you do one wrong thing your life can really end," she said.

AFTER LOSING TO LSU the Hawkeyes cried in the locker room. "Bawled," Caitlin said. She and Kate Martin hugged McKenna Warnock and Monika Czinano. They'd become sisters. Two weeks of adrenaline ran out, and they awakened to lives that had changed in ways they never could have imagined on the flight out to Seattle. Now they just wanted to go home.

Everyone headed back to the team hotel to meet their families and friends. Caitlin hadn't even taken off her uniform.

She kept it together until she saw her father.

He waited for her in the lobby.

She burst into tears and buried her head in his shoulder.

"You have so much to be proud of," he told her.

"I know but still it's sad, Dad," she said.

She went upstairs and stood in the shower for a long time and let the adrenaline and stress run out with the draining water. Is this real life? She tried to understand what was different. Then she led her teammates three blocks away from the hotel to toast their season. The name of the bar was Happiest Hour, and the staff didn't seem prepared for two dozen very tired, very nostalgic, very thirsty women.

"I don't think you should write about any of this," Caitlin said with a smile, "but I'm gonna tell you anyway."

An Iowa fan asked Caitlin if he could buy the team a drink.

"Twenty-two shots!" she said.

Soon a tray showed up. Twenty-two. That night might end up being Caitlin's favorite memory from college. This group of women truly loved one another and for the rest of their lives when they looked at their Final Four rings, or came to some anniversary and saw the banner hanging in the rafters, it is that love they would remember. And evenings like the one in Dallas after they lost the biggest game of their lives but still had one another. She changed her mind about wanting people to know about that night.

"You can write about that," she said. "I don't really care."

They stayed out all night, sad, yes, but sad together, which was its own kind of joy. They told stories, about being stuck in traffic at Maryland or the shot Caitlin hit against Indiana. They all dragged themselves out of bed in time to catch an afternoon flight back to Iowa, and the team leaders kept doing head counts and asking if everyone was present and accounted for and if everyone was OK. They wore hoodies and sunglasses. Kate Martin cradled a Jimmy John's submarine sandwich in the lobby. No. 5, the Vito -- salami, capocollo and provolone. Caitlin gloated because she'd had the foresight to pack before the game. The players shared pictures and retold the stories. They limped to the plane and flew back home.

THEY WENT THEIR separate ways, and Caitlin sank into her summer. She signed millions of dollars of contracts and flew to Los Angeles to shoot big-budget commercials where a grip held an umbrella over her head to block the sun.

She tried to hold it for herself.

She couldn't believe how much free stuff she got.

"This is why the rich are so rich," she said. "They get things for free. It's so weird."

McKenna Warnock started dental school. Monika Czinano tried and failed to land one of those 144 WNBA roster spots. Kathryn Reynolds got a job offer she couldn't refuse, running a new women's softball league.

Caitlin got gifts for her teammates from her sponsors. Huge loads of free Nike gear including these rare Dunks. Bose headphones. She went to big corporate meetings with her parents following along stunned, proud, bewildered. The PGA Tour swung through Iowa, and she played with Masters champion (and native Iowan) Zach Johnson in front of packed galleries. She practiced for days before her first tee shot, not wanting to embarrass herself. The next morning, she came to an Iowa workout and, as the managers said, "torched everyone."

"It was unbelievable," Prewitt told me.

McIntire just shook his head.

"Hadn't shot a basketball in four days," he said.

"I think she does as good a job of balancing it as she can," Prewitt said.

The Iowa women's season tickets sold out for the first time ever on Aug. 2. Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen were sitting together when they got the call from the ticket office and both women cried. They'd never ridden a wave like this one, after a lifetime dedicated to furthering their sport. They also worried about the toll all this exponentially growing attention was having on their young phenom.

I asked Jensen once how she could tell when Caitlin felt overwhelmed.

Easy, she told me.

She always hits the practice gym with a bounce, with a smile and an inner ferocity, and when she is drained, it's immediately obvious.

"When was the last time you saw her like that?" I asked.

There was a long pause.

"This summer she was really busy," Jensen said finally.

The Iowa coaches found themselves organizing the entire team practice calendar around Caitlin's travel schedule. They wanted her to be able to go receive awards and soak up the glory. But it all got to be a lot.

"She wants to be a kid, too," Jensen said. "It's summer, you know? This summer was taxing on her."

I ARRIVED A MONTH later to find Caitlin Clark trying to be all things to all people, feeling the expectations of what's next while raging at the inexperience of her new forwards and centers. She always seemed to know when I was at practice and would thank me for coming. I sense she does that with every visitor. I have written about athletes for two decades but I've never, until now, watched someone change from a solid into a liquid and a liquid into a gas. That knowledge made the whole industry of profiling great athletes seem almost silly, because whatever "makes her tick" is deeply internal and unknown, even to her. She was leaving an old life behind and learning how to fit comfortably in a new one. I found myself texting with her father all the time, and he found comfort in his own mantra. Stay hungry and humble. I began to watch her play like the Iowa coaches did, focusing on the moments during practice and games when she faced frustration, to see how she would react.

The coaches and players saw everything. Caitlin getting furious about no-calls in practice. With success has come a raised metabolism. There haven't been any fist fights inside the team but there has been a lot of preamble. Screaming and cursing. This is a championship-caliber team trying to reclaim the form that earned it that status, so that the reality inside the basement of Carver-Hawkeye often differs dramatically from the exterior reputation. The rankings all season called Iowa a top-five team, but Caitlin Clark knew better. Therefore everyone else knew, too. At one scrimmage, Caitlin's anger at the no-calls translated into bad shots -- she often fires up wilder and wilder attempts when she's mad, even now -- and she missed two-thirds of them. Nobody is harder on Caitlin Clark than Caitlin Clark.

"I suck!" she'll bark at herself on the bench.

During the scrimmage she threw a pass that bounced off Gabbie Marshall's hands. She looked over at the coaches in disgust, and they could see the fit coming. Everyone worried that they'd gone back in time to her freshman year. This again? became a refrain.

The season went on, with the public accolades growing, and I kept calling people inside the program and showing up when I could.

"What is the Caitlin patience meter currently?" I'd often ask.

"Decent," I was told once.

At that day's practice, assistant Abby Stamp told Caitlin there would be no March magic without her teammates.

"You're gonna need her," Stamp said.

"Yeah but she missed me on the cut," she replied.

A few days before, Jensen had stood up for one of her bigs. Caitlin had been barking orders, and the coach told her to settle down.

"But ..." Caitlin started.

"Stop butting me," Jensen said. "Throw her the ball."

"Throw it to her."

Caitlin wanted more than anything to go back to the Final Four, because she'd tasted the glory but also the calm and focus of stepping onto the court against South Carolina.

I asked her about the drama at practice.

"I have these new players and I'm not comfortable and they're not comfortable," she told me. "How do I navigate having patience? Giving them confidence? They don't have the confidence of minutes."

She and her crew -- Kate, McKenna, Mon, Gabbie -- had been to war together.

"The amount of huge games we were in last year," she said, starting to visibly percolate at the memory of such beautiful intensity. "WAKE UP! We're here. We're playing Louisville in the Elite Eight. We're playing Georgia in the round of 32 and it's a four-point game with 30 seconds to go!"

Her great flaw in the context of the team, she has learned, is her complete lack of a poker face. If she feels it, she wears it.

"Your one compliment to somebody can give them so much confidence," she said. "It's scary almost how much power ... Because it goes both ways. You get upset with them, they're crumbling."

She switched to third person to mock herself and rolled her eyes as she talked.

"Caitlin Clark believes in them, what more do they need?"

She snapped her fingers.

"I can never have a bad reaction," she said.

She worked hard to get better, to relearn the lessons of the past, which seemed like new problems because of her new and growing fame and the expectations that came with it, both the external ones put on her by the world and the internal ones put on her by herself. There's a John Updike quote I love about the mask eating the face that seemed to apply to what Caitlin was experiencing. The Iowa coaches were hyper aware of that possibility, that the famous Caitlin Clark would swallow the goofy girl they'd known, and they believed at the end that they had all mostly succeeded. Caitlin had managed to protect herself. Her real self.

There were positive moments that reflected all her hard work. Great moments that allowed everyone to dream of March. Once at practice Caitlin came flying down the court in transition. Addi O'Grady was wide open around the free throw line. Caitlin got to the logo and jacked up a 3-pointer, which went in. O'Grady never once yelled for the ball.

Jensen threw up her hands in disgust and yelled, "Ugh!"

Caitlin came right to her.

"The reason I didn't throw it ..." she began to explain.

Jensen cut her off and said that it was Addi's fault for not screaming for the ball and that the coaches were annoyed about that. Bluder and Jensen wanted all the centers to act like Monika Czinano and expect the ball every single trip down the court, to call for it, to deliver once she received the pass. To them Caitlin didn't do anything wrong. The center needs to demand respect. "She can detect weakness," Bluder told me. "I think she likes strong people. People that are good leaders. People who will use their voice."

The coaches also believed Caitlin taking it on herself to explain what she was seeing meant that all their messages were getting through and she was paying attention. During a later practice she threw an errant entry pass to O'Grady. The ball fell uselessly away. All the coaches turned to see what would happen next. They held their breath.

Caitlin made eye contact with Addi.

"My bad," Caitlin said.

THE HAWKEYES EXPERIENCED incredible highs and lows together.

They beat Virginia Tech.

Caitlin appeared on the ManningCast for "Monday Night Football."

They lost to K-State.

Jason Sudeikis and Sue Bird came to sit courtside. During a television timeout, Sudeikis did his Ted Lasso dance on the jumbotron and Carver-Hawkeye rocked in the reflected celebrity. Afterward Caitlin and her family took Jason out to dinner. They sat in the window at Basta on Iowa Avenue.

"He talks just like he does in the show!" Caitlin gushed to her mom after.

One night in February, forward Hannah Stuelke scored 47 points against Penn State on a night Caitlin had 15 assists. "I think our connection is amazing. I love playing with her," Stuelke said.

Three days later, Caitlin went scoreless in the fourth quarter and the Hawkeyes blew a 14-point lead in a loss to Nebraska.

Her coaches worried and hoped.

"I want her to learn how to manage all this," Jensen told me. "The NIL stuff. The popularity. The stardom. I want her to manage that and still love the game, you know?"

Everyone looked to make sure Caitlin didn't lose her sense of wonder.

"She seems like a child when we bring dogs into the facility and she gets on the floor and is rolling around with them and being a kid and screaming," Jensen said. "She goes from one extreme to the other so quickly: 'I'm this unbelievable athlete' to 'I'm this little kid.'"

They experienced success, celebrity, frustration and failure. I met the team in Columbus, Ohio, in late January. Nothing went right for the Hawkeyes. Kate Martin raged at the officials and her opponents and Caitlin ended up in the rare position of being the voice of reason, urging calm and moderation. None of their shots fell. If Iowa gets beat in March, it will be because of an afternoon like the one they had in Columbus. With a minute left I went down into the narrow hallway outside the visitors locker room. I heard a commotion but didn't see what happened. Suddenly the campus police officer who travels with the team helped a slumping Caitlin past me, her head thrown back in pain. An Ohio State student storming the court had collided with her. Caitlin's mom was on a rampage in the bowels of the arena, furious about the lack of security. We all went to the airport and flew back to Cedar Rapids, where university charter buses picked us up to drive back to campus. We parked outside the garage where the players keep their cars for away games. Everyone climbed off the bus -- except Caitlin. She was in the little bathroom in the way back throwing her guts up.

I left her and went to the garage. The first person I saw was Kate Martin. I asked what was wrong.

"Migraines," Martin said. "She gets 'em really bad."

THE NEXT DAY Caitlin and a group of teammates got ready at their off-campus apartments. They changed into fancy clothes and called an Uber and were pulling out of the complex when they saw a whole bunch of flashing lights. As they got closer they realized it was their teammate Ava Jones who'd been in the wreck. Ava hasn't played a minute for the Hawkeyes; two days after she committed, she and her family were at a basketball tournament in Louisville when a drug-addled driver ran them down on the sidewalk. Ava suffered a traumatic brain injury and devastating knee and shoulder injuries. Her father died. The Iowa coaches honored their commitment and she is an emotional member of the team even if she can't play. Her teammates worry over her all the time. Now she'd been in a fender bender.

"Just cancel the ride," Caitlin said. "That's our teammate, can you just stop?"

The cops working the accident tried to keep the young women away but stood little chance of stopping them.

"We're her teammates!" Caitlin said.

Molly Davis pulled up, on her way back to the apartments from a massage. Soon coach Raina Harmon showed up, too. Before too long half the team was standing in the middle of the street. They all stayed with Ava until it was clear she was OK. Some of the Hawkeyes talked to her, while others talked to the police and paramedics. Caitlin kept texting her mother, who was waiting with Brent and me for her 22nd birthday dinner.

Finally they made it. Caitlin's migraine, which she always suffers through without complaint, had blessedly vanished. We sat down and they recounted what had happened with Ava. For the next few hours everyone laughed and told stories. We finished our meals, and the restaurant brought over a riff on a chocolate chip cookie. Caitlin loves chocolate chip cookies. The teammates told Anne what they saw of the incident after the game in Columbus. Kate Martin, they said gleefully, threatened to fight the Ohio State student section. She'd be Charles Oakley to Caitlin's Michael Jordan. Everyone laughed. Caitlin the loudest.

"I see Caitlin on the ground and I just start seeing red," Martin explained.

When the game ended Caitlin looked to find the Buckeyes to shake their hands when all the fans rushed the court. The Iowa coaches started urgently telling the Iowa players to get to the locker room. Caitlin took off at a dead sprint -- "which was problem number one," she said -- and never saw the Ohio State student until they collided. When she picked up her phone, she saw a text from her former football player brother: "Next time explode through their sternum."

Everyone at the dinner table laughed about that.

Martin ran up right after the collision to see her best friend on the ground.

"What happened?"

"I got drilled," Caitlin said.

"A fan ran into her," said Jada Gyamfi , a forward who wears No. 23.

Around 4 a.m., once they got home from the game, Caitlin got a text from Monika Czinano asking if she needed to hire a hit man. Martin sounded embarrassed as she described to all of us at dinner how she stalked around cursing at people and trying to find someone to fight. She was repeating the wilder things she said and then Caitlin started doing her impression of Martin.

"Whatever," Kate said. "I'm ride or die for my ladies."

Caitlin's parents paid. This was their treat. Then Kate sheepishly revealed she'd had a bit of parking trouble when she'd pulled up outside earlier. Her car was, she admitted, parked on top of a curb and a snowdrift. She needed help pushing it out. Jada, Will McIntire and I got low and started to push. Martin sat behind the wheel. We all made sure not to let Caitlin anywhere near the operation. None of us wanted to be responsible for a tire rolling over her foot and ending the greatest college basketball season anyone has ever had.

"Twenty-two is not touching this car!" I said.

Gyamfi laughed.

"This is a job for two-three," she said.

"I gotta get this on video!" Caitlin said.

We all pushed, then leaned in and pushed harder, as Kate spun her tires then caught a little traction and lurched to safety. Everyone cheered, me included, and Caitlin was part of the action, but also separate from it, her life pulling her in one direction and her teammates in another. Finally, she stopped recording and I watched them all go out into the night, still celebrating.

THIS IS A STORY about being 22. Do you remember when you first started on the road to your dreams? That's where Caitlin Clark finds herself in March 2024. She has announced her intention to enter the WNBA draft. Her future has begun, the world she built during four life-changing years in Iowa City. All the things she wants to be are there to be grasped. Her games draw bigger audiences than many NBA games. She is at the epicenter of sports -- a superstar without caveats or adjectives. She isn't important because of symbolic broken barriers but because she steps onto a 94-foot-long rectangle and dominates it. In the month after her birthday, Caitlin Clark kept rising to the occasion. She broke the NCAA women's career scoring record -- the record-breaking shot came from 30 feet, three of her career-high 49 -- then the actual women's scoring record held by Lynette Woodard, who got invited to Iowa for the event and revelled in the standing ovation she received from Carver-Hawkeye. Then on senior night she broke Pete Maravich's men's career scoring record. No human being playing Division I basketball has ever scored more. The rapper Travis Scott came to see her break Pistol Pete's record and posed for pictures with the whole team. Jake from State Farm came. He wore a designer jacket made from Caitlin's jersey. Nolan Ryan snuck in beneath a baseball cap with his granddaughters. It was important to him that they witness Caitlin. The television ratings shattered records. Patrick Mahomes praised her. So did LeBron James. These moments, and so many others, happened in public. Her brother and I texted back and forth during these incredible few weeks when it seemed like the entire country had turned its attention to her greatness.

Everyone around her seemed happy. Not because of records. Not because of what excited the rest of the basketball world but because of something that happened offstage just eight days before she broke the NCAA's women's record. Opponents, beware. On Feb. 7, the Hawkeyes held a practice before Penn State came to Iowa City. The season's metabolism had started to peak. Kate Martin stopped practice to preach about the importance of knowing the scouting report, and the whole team hung on her every word, and Jensen looked over to catch Bluder staring with admiration and joy at Martin's command of the room.

A bit later, during a scrimmage, Addi O'Grady, who had at one point retreated into an introverted shell in response to the barrage of pressure from Caitlin, got down on the post and just knocked one of the team managers on his ass.

This was everything Caitlin Clark loved about basketball. The competition, the aggression, the way that every moment produced a winner and a loser, the willingness to go hard, to risk. O'Grady had won the moment. She'd know what that felt like now. She could do it again. Caitlin ran to her. She jumped up and down and screamed and praised and threw around joyous curses and exaltations. The coaches beamed. This was a team. Jan Jensen cried about it later, she said. They'd traveled the road. They'd put last season in its place and made this one its own. It was February. The doors were closed and there were no cameras. Nobody sat courtside or wanted autographs. Caitlin was at the center of it but not hitting 3s or firing passes behind her back. She was all out in praise of a teammate. She believed.

"YES!" she screamed. "ADDI!!"

These are the moments the team will remember decades from now, when they gather as middle-aged women. Renting yachts and pushing cars out of the snow. Posting up on the block. This is a story about being 21, yes, and 22, but also about being 41, and 52, and older than that. The Iowa Hawkeyes of the Caitlin Clark years will stand one day at center court beneath their banners, with husbands and wives and partners, with kids and grandkids. They know this. And they know they will find themselves unable to describe how it felt all those years ago, when they were young and magic and ready for March.

Idaho college murders case prompts prosecution request for big budget hike

The Latah County prosecutor has requested $135,000 for trial expenses.

Justice may be blind, but it's not cheap.

Prosecutors in Moscow, Idaho, this week said the upcoming prosecution of Bryan Kohberger, the man charged with killing four college students last fall, could cost more than eight times their entire annual trial budget.

Meeting with county commissioners Tuesday, Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson requested a $135,000 budget, as his team puts together what is expected to be a complicated and high-profile case.

Thompson said they know the trial "is not going to be cheap," according to the minutes from the meeting, obtained by ABC News, acknowledging the request is a significant departure from the $15,000 budget they had maintained "for years and years."

Thompson said his office is trying to keep its projected budget "as conservative as possible," while at the same time "[making] sure the case is handled properly."

MORE: Idaho college murder suspect Bryan Kohberger requests more time to decide offering alibi

Among the anticipated expenses, Thompson's budget request cites "witness travel fees, transcript fees, exhibit display expenses [and] postage fees," as well as "travel associated with case development, expert witnesses and other associated trial expenses," according to the budget request.

Thompson said his office is also proposing to add a "part-time legal assistant" position to the payroll in order to help shoulder the workload, according to the meeting minutes.

One of the commissioners on the board, Kathie LaFortune, suggested an even larger allowance for Thompson's budget, according to meeting minutes, suggesting an increase to $150,000 in order to fully cover potential costs.

Separately, the defense has been augmenting its resources, as well.

Kohberger's lead counsel, the chief public defender in neighboring Kootenai County, Anne Taylor, is receiving $200 an hour -- an amount agreed to by Latah County upon her hiring. Taylor's co-counsel is receiving $180 an hour. Additional further expenses to the case include hiring a private investigator and experts' services to aid their case.

Kohberger, 28, was indicted last month and charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. At his arraignment in late May, Kohberger declined to offer a plea, so the judge entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.

A trial date has been set for Oct. 2.

Kohberger is currently being held in the Latah County Jail in Moscow.

MORE: Investigators probe Bryan Kohberger's social media in connection with Idaho college murders

Prosecutors allege that in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, Kohberger, a criminology Ph.D. student at Washington State University, broke into an off-campus home and stabbed to death four University of Idaho students: Ethan Chapin, 20; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21.

After a more than six-week hunt, police zeroed in on Kohberger as a suspect, tracking his white Hyundai Elantra, cell phone signal data, and recovering what authorities say was his DNA on a knife sheath found next to one of the victims' bodies, according to court documents. He was arrested on Dec. 30, 2022, in Pennsylvania, after driving cross-country to spend the holidays at his family home in Albrightsville.

The quadruple homicide in November rocked Moscow, Idaho, the college town where the killings occurred; the ensuing investigation, and impending trial, strained the city's already slim budget .

Police overtime and other expenses mounted exponentially, with the ongoing need for increased patrols and law enforcement work -- and shouldered by a short-staffed force putting in long hours.

The bottom line, officials said: The ongoing cost of the case has burned through cash that could have gone to benefit the community and fix up city infrastructure.

"Moscow is not awash in a funding excess," Moscow Mayor Art Bettge told ABC News in May. "We run a very, very lean budget, and the impact of the investigation has been felt on the budget."

Even with a suspect in custody, the ongoing investigation had depleted Moscow's coffers and scrambled an already fragile balance sheet, city officials said.

"You budget for fires. You budget for floods. You prepare for natural disasters. This was not natural," Moscow City Council member Sandra Kelly told ABC News. "The cost is astronomical. And of course, you can't skimp on keeping people safe. Yet, this is just not something you budget for -- because it's something you'd never dream could happen."

FOLLOW THE PODCAST: " The King Road Killings: An Idaho Murder Mystery " from ABC News, available on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Amazon Music , or your preferred podcast player.

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