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The WNBA Draft Has a Red Carpet Now, and Somewhere in There, a Draft

Duke Holloway
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The WNBA Draft Has a Red Carpet Now, and Somewhere in There, a Draft

Denise turned the TV on at six for the WNBA Draft and by six-oh-four we were watching a twenty-two-year-old shooting guard walk down a hallway in a floor-length coat that had, and I am not making this up, feathers. Feathers on the sleeves. Feathers on the collar. She walked past a step-and-repeat while a woman with a microphone asked her about her "energy" and her "story" and did not once ask her about, for instance, basketball.

I’ve watched every WNBA Draft since Rebecca Lobo went first overall in a boxy blazer and one earring, and I can tell you exactly what she said when they called her name. She said "thank you." That was it. Two syllables. Then she went and played for the Liberty and rebounded like her life depended on it. There was no tunnel walk. There was a tunnel, and she walked through it, and nobody filmed it because the tunnel was for getting from one place to another, which is what tunnels are for.

My old coach, DiMaggio, used to say that if you needed a runway to get to the gym, you weren’t going to the gym, you were going to a party that happened to have a hoop in it. DiMaggio has been dead since 2011 and I still hear him in my kitchen. He would have looked at this pre-show — three hours long, if you counted the pre-pre-show, which apparently they do — and he would have said one word, and I can’t print the word, but you know the word.

Ray Kowalczyk called me during what ESPN was billing as "The Walk-In," which is what they are now calling women walking into a building. Ray coached JV girls in Elyria for thirty-one years and knows more about the pick-and-roll than most people in an NBA front office. Ray said, "Duke, is this the draft or is this the Grammys." I said, Ray, I honestly could not tell you. He said, "They’re interviewing her mother." I said, I know. He said, "About her outfit." I said, I know, Ray. He said he was going to go clean his gutters and hung up.

Here’s the thing, and I’ll say it once so nobody comes at me on Facebook. The players are great. The players are the best they have ever been. The kid going first overall tonight has a mid-range game that would make Dawn Staley weep and a handle you could not knock loose with a crowbar. These kids grew up in a gym. They watched film in the seventh grade. They know spacing better than half the men getting paid eight figures to not know spacing. I have no complaints about the players. My complaint is that we are covering the players like they are a Marvel movie premiere and the basketball is a bonus feature on the Blu-ray.

By the time the actual commissioner got up to the podium to announce an actual pick, I had watched: two "get ready with me" segments, one interview with a stylist named Corbin, a podcast crossover with something called The Ringer Ringer, four DraftKings promos, three FanDuel promos, and a nine-minute feature on a rookie’s dog. The dog’s name is Muffin. Muffin has a verified account. Muffin has, I am told, a brand deal. Coach DiMaggio, if you’re listening, I’m sorry.

The picks themselves took forty minutes and were sandwiched between what the graphics kept calling "content moments," which is what television people now call the parts of television where nothing is happening. I saw a woman get drafted, hug her mother, put on a hat, and then get asked about her skincare routine before she’d taken three steps off the stage. Her skincare routine. She just got drafted. She hasn’t had a skincare routine since she was seventeen. She has had ice packs.

My nephew Petey Corrigan, who runs a parlay app on his phone the way I used to run a paper route, texted me at halftime of the pre-show to ask if I wanted in on a "draft position over-under with a fit bonus." A fit bonus, Petey explained, is extra money if the player’s outfit matches a color they preselect. I asked him if this was gambling on the draft or gambling on the stylist. He said "both, actually," like he was proud of it.

The last pick of the first round went to a six-foot-four center out of Stanford who has a beautiful hook shot and, according to the sideline correspondent, "a really specific point of view on vintage denim." She was drafted eleventh overall. She was asked one basketball question and four denim questions. She handled them all with more grace than I would have. She is going to be a problem for the league in the best way.

Denise says the chili’s ready. She heard about the recipe on a podcast. I did not ask which one.

NASA Sells Artemis II as Earth Day Milestone, Omits Rocket

Lena Wexler
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NASA Sells Artemis II as Earth Day Milestone, Omits Rocket

HOUSTON — NASA’s public affairs office rolled out an Earth Day-themed briefing package for the Artemis II crewed lunar flyby on Sunday, describing the upcoming mission as “an unprecedented opportunity to see our home planet with new eyes” and declining to elaborate on the roughly eight million pounds of thrust required to arrange that vantage point.

The 34-page document, distributed to educators and reporters ahead of Earth Day, mentions “Earth” 141 times, “planet” 96 times, and “stewardship” 22 times. It mentions “solid rocket booster” zero times. A section titled “Our Fragile Blue Marble” is followed immediately by a one-paragraph section titled “Launch Vehicle Overview,” which reads primarily like a disclaimer.

“The framing is that Artemis II is fundamentally an Earth science mission that happens to require a rocket,” said a NASA communications staffer who requested anonymity because they had not been cleared to discuss the framing. “We’re leaning into the photography angle. The astronauts will take a lot of pictures of Earth. That part is true.”

Crew media coaching this month has focused on pivoting launch-emissions questions back toward what the mission will reveal about ocean temperature, cloud cover, and, in one suggested talking point, “the beauty of a world worth protecting.” Astronauts have been advised to gesture toward the planet when delivering this answer.

Environmental analysts noted that a single SLS launch releases roughly the CO2-equivalent of a mid-sized coal plant running for a day, though they were careful to add that this is a rounding error next to global aviation and that no one at the Sierra Club particularly wants to be the organization that comes out against the Moon.

“It’s a rocket. Rockets burn things. We know,” said Priya Sundaresan, a policy fellow at the Atlantic Heartland Project. “The move NASA is making is inviting us to notice the photograph and not the camera. It’s a very good photograph. That doesn’t make the camera electric.”

NASA declined to say whether the Earth Day framing had been focus-grouped, but confirmed the mission patch — which depicts the planet prominently and the launch vehicle not at all — was selected from four finalists, three of which also depicted the planet prominently and the launch vehicle not at all.

Asked whether the agency planned any Earth Day messaging that acknowledged the launch itself, a spokesperson said preparations were ongoing and directed further questions to a fact sheet titled “Why We Go,” which does not mention the rocket.

A’s Vegas Ballpark Will Be Funded by ‘Tokenized Seat Equity,’ Which Is Bonds

Cody Thompson
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A’s Vegas Ballpark Will Be Funded by ‘Tokenized Seat Equity,’ Which Is Bonds

LAS VEGAS, NV — The Athletics on Friday unveiled a $1.75 billion financing structure for their planned Tropicana-site ballpark that team president Marc Badain called “a completely new instrument,” and which finance professionals identified within roughly six seconds as bonds.

Under the plan, buyers of “Seat Equity Tokens” will receive fractional exposure to the ballpark’s future ticket revenue, redeemable in 2038 at a fixed lump-sum payment. The Athletics’ press release referred to this arrangement as “on-chain” seven times, “revolutionary” four times, and “a bond” zero times.

The offering document, a 94-page PDF hosted on a website that briefly redirected to a defunct FTX help page, explains that the tokens will trade on a permissioned exchange operated by a Cayman entity whose sole officer is also the team’s assistant general counsel. Projected yield is 6.4%, roughly in line with an A-rated muni, and slightly lower than what sportsbooks two blocks away were paying Friday on the Dodgers to win the West.

“This isn’t debt,” said Trell Kavaris, chief structuring officer at Mesa-Ridge Digital Capital, standing beside a poster board of the token’s logo that had been mounted slightly askew. “It’s participation. It’s community. It’s a claim on future cash flows secured by a specific asset with a fixed redemption date. Which, and I want to be very clear about this, is not a bond.”

The Athletics have committed to accepting three stablecoins for token purchases, including one that traded at $0.71 as recently as March. Season-ticket holders were offered a “loyalty discount” of 40 basis points, delivered as a separate token that cannot be sold, transferred, or, according to the FAQ, “understood at this time.”

A spokesperson for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, reached at a Wahoo’s on Sahara, said the agency was “aware of the filing” and had “some questions,” pausing to add hot sauce. The commissioner’s office declined comment, though a person familiar with the discussions said Rob Manfred had, upon reviewing the term sheet, asked twice whether this was “just bonds.”

The first tranche is scheduled to close during the club’s home opener on April 24, with buyers receiving a commemorative NFT of the seat they did not purchase and a physical certificate that a team employee confirmed will be printed on regular paper at the Kinko’s near the front office.

Institutional interest has been limited. A managing director at a mid-sized Ohio pension fund, eating a chopped salad at his desk, said he had reviewed the deck for eleven minutes before forwarding it to compliance with the subject line “lol.” Retail interest has been more robust: the token’s Discord grew to 41,000 members by Friday afternoon, most of whom appear to be under the impression they are buying actual seats.

The Athletics play their home games this season in Sacramento.

Hung Cao Finally Wins Something, and It’s the Entire Navy

Nash Grayson
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Hung Cao Finally Wins Something, and It’s the Entire Navy

WASHINGTON — After losing a House race in 2022, a Senate race in 2024, and what associates describe as “a real bad round of trivia” in early 2025, former Navy SEAL Hung Cao was elevated Friday to acting Secretary of the Navy, becoming the first person in American history to fail into command of a nuclear-armed fleet.

Cao takes over from John Phelan, the financier-turned-secretary who departed the administration Friday morning citing “personal reasons” and what a source familiar with his thinking described as “the growing suspicion that the Navy has, like, actual boats in it.”

Phelan, whose primary qualification for running the world’s largest maritime force was managing a hedge fund, is expected to return to the private sector, where the ships are metaphorical and the sailors do not email you.

“This is a natural progression,” said Beacon Strategy defense analyst Wren Delacorte, who tracks Pentagon personnel. “The Trump administration has established a coherent pipeline: lose a statewide race, get nominated to run a branch of the armed forces, and eventually inherit it when the guy above you remembers he can just leave.”

Cao, who was serving as Under Secretary, ascends to acting secretary under a Vacancies Act provision that Congress passed in 1998 and has since regretted approximately once per administration. Aides say he plans to spend his first week reviewing shipbuilding contracts, meeting with the Chief of Naval Operations, and, per one staffer, “figuring out which of these are the submarines.”

Supporters point to Cao’s actual military service — 25 years in Naval Special Warfare, multiple deployments — as evidence that he is, in fact, the most qualified acting secretary the department has seen since roughly Tuesday. Critics note that the qualification bar in this administration is a chalk line someone rubbed out with their shoe.

A Senate Armed Services aide, reached by phone, said confirmation hearings for a permanent replacement would begin “whenever the White House sends a name, which historically has been the Wednesday before Thanksgiving of an unspecified year.”

Phelan is reportedly considering a book. Cao is reportedly considering the Pacific.

At press time, three additional two-time losers from the 2024 cycle had submitted résumés to the Pentagon, one of them addressed simply to “whoever’s left.”

US, Iran Agree to Two-Week Ceasefire, Long Enough for Both Sides to Reload

Nash Grayson
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US, Iran Agree to Two-Week Ceasefire, Long Enough for Both Sides to Reload

WASHINGTON — The United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran signed a fourteen-day ceasefire Friday morning, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and granting both militaries the precise amount of time necessary to take inventory, place new orders, and remember which coastline was theirs.

The agreement, negotiated in Muscat over what one participant described as “a very productive plate of dates,” runs through April 24, at which point both governments will either extend the ceasefire, quietly ignore it, or resume hostilities with the enhanced equipment they will have purchased in the interim. Officials confirmed the two-week window was chosen because three weeks “felt like a commitment.”

A freight broker at the Port of Fujairah, reached by phone during his lunch, said tanker traffic resumed almost immediately. “Everybody’s moving. The Saudis are moving, the Chinese are moving, and there’s a U.S. destroyer parked out there that hasn’t stopped waving at us since sunrise,” he said. “You can tell it’s peace because the insurance premiums only doubled.”

Under the terms of the deal, Iran agrees not to mine the strait, seize commercial vessels, or fire on U.S. assets, in exchange for which the United States agrees to describe all of the above as “regional de-escalation” for the next fourteen days. A senior administration official, speaking on background because he had not yet been assigned talking points, called the framework “the most durable ceasefire we’ve ever built with an expiration date printed on it.”

President Trump celebrated the agreement Friday afternoon in the Rose Garden, telling reporters the deal was “the best ceasefire, probably ever, and it only took two weeks, which is a lot faster than the longer ones.” Pressed on what happens on day fifteen, the President said he had “a lot of options,” gestured vaguely at an aide holding a folder, and moved on to a question about the Michael Jackson biopic.

Iranian state media hailed the arrangement as a decisive victory secured through the courage of the Iranian people and the strategic patience of the Supreme Leader, who is, per U.S. officials, still dead. A spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry clarified that the country’s negotiating posture had not been affected by “minor personnel developments” and that any successor, once named, would honor the deal for as long as it remained convenient.

Analysts at MERIDIAN-3, a Beltway policy shop that exists primarily to be quoted on days like this, noted that fourteen-day ceasefires historically produce one of three outcomes: extension, collapse, or a second fourteen-day ceasefire that pretends the first one worked. “This is what we call a rolling peace,” said senior fellow Amara Doss. “It’s peace in the same way a rental car is your car.”

Shipping insurers, oil traders, and every foreign ministry between Ankara and New Delhi spent Friday afternoon quietly modeling what April 25 looks like. Pentagon planners, reached for comment, said they were focused on the ceasefire itself and had not begun preparing for its conclusion, a statement no one in the room believed, including the person making it.

The State Department confirmed that Secretary Rubio would travel to the region next week to shore up the agreement, meet with Gulf partners, and stand near enough to the Strait of Hormuz to be photographed with it. Asked whether the trip constituted a vote of confidence in the ceasefire’s durability, a spokeswoman said the Secretary had booked a return flight, which she described as “one data point.”

Ray Duffield Is Umping AND Grilling. It’s Going About How You’d Expect.

Hal Cranston
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Ray Duffield Is Umping AND Grilling. It’s Going About How You’d Expect.

MILLERSBURG, OH — Ray Duffield called strike three on a full-count curveball Wednesday evening from behind the screen window of the Millersburg Little League concession stand, where he was also flipping a hot dog and asking a mother of four whether she wanted onions.

The 62-year-old retired postal worker is, as of Monday night’s board meeting, the only registered volunteer left in the Holmes County Youth Baseball District 4 umpire pool, and also the only person willing to run the grill. Ray informed parents Tuesday that they would have to pick one. They did not pick one.

“It’s mostly working,” said Cheryl Vickers, whose son Cody plays third for the Millersburg Rotary Rockets. “You just have to listen for whether he says ‘strike’ or ‘mustard.’ Sometimes it’s both, and then you’re just guessing.”

Ray’s calls have, by most accounts, been fair. He missed a balk in the second inning because a bun caught fire. He ruled a fly ball fair based on where he thought it had landed, though the concession window faces first base and offers what he described as “an angle.” A ground-rule double in the fourth was called from memory, since Ray was in the back looking for the good tongs.

League president Doug Enright, reached by phone, confirmed the arrangement was not ideal but noted that last season the umpire situation was measurably worse — the games were being called by Doug.

A parent-led effort to recruit additional umpires has produced two candidates. One is Ray’s brother, who lives in Wooster and cannot commit to Tuesdays. The other, according to the sign-up sheet taped to the dugout fence, is Ray.

The kids appear to have adjusted. Cody Vickers struck out looking in the fifth on a pitch he later described, with the composure of a much older man, as “called by a guy holding tongs.” His coach did not argue. His coach was, at that moment, working the popcorn.

The Rockets won 8-6. Or 8-5. Ray was, at one point in the sixth, on the phone with his wife about a leak in the basement, and a run may have scored while he was covering the mouthpiece.

Between innings, a batter approached the concession window and asked Ray if he could get a blue slushie. Ray told the boy he was up next and to focus. The kid struck out on three pitches, all of which Ray called from the grill while turning a dog he had, by then, been turning for a while.

Grafton Merchants Opened to 19 Fans. The Anthem Was Sung by a Dentist.

Hal Cranston
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Grafton Merchants Opened to 19 Fans. The Anthem Was Sung by a Dentist.

GRAFTON, W.Va. — The Grafton Merchants, an unaffiliated amateur baseball club that has played its home openers at Blue Diamond Field every April since 1974, welcomed the 2026 season Wednesday afternoon to a crowd of 19, a figure that includes both umpires and the woman selling raffle tickets from a card table behind the backstop.

First pitch was scheduled for 1:00 p.m. It went at 1:38, delayed while the club located someone willing to sing the national anthem after the scheduled soloist, a junior at Grafton High, called in from a dental appointment that had, per her mother, “opened up into something larger.” The anthem was ultimately performed by Dr. Ronald Kettering, DDS, who had been in the parking lot eating a sandwich and agreed on the condition that he not be asked to hold the last note.

“He held it anyway,” said Merchants president Del Vickers, 68, who has run the club since 1997 and describes attendance in terms of how many folding chairs he sets out. Vickers said he set out 60. “We’re building,” he added.

The concession stand, operated this year by the Grafton Kiwanis, ran out of hot dogs in the third inning. Kiwanis treasurer Peg Marlin said the club had purchased two packages of eight, “because last year we threw out a package and a half, and I refuse to do that again on principle.”

By the fifth inning, three of the 19 attendees had left — one to move his truck, two because the sun had come around the grandstand and neither had brought a hat. The Merchants lost 11-2 to the visiting Buckhannon Bison Club, a team that in 2023 forfeited its entire season due to what Vickers would describe only as “a van situation.”

Asked after the game whether he was concerned about turnout, Merchants manager Gary Pruitt, in his fourteenth year, said he was not. “Opening Day’s always slow,” Pruitt said. “The Reds are on. People got taxes. My own wife didn’t come and we live behind the outfield.”

Dr. Kettering, reached by phone Wednesday evening, said he had never sung the national anthem in public before and had learned the words in the parking lot, on his phone. “The high notes are toward the end,” he said, “which I did not know coming in.”

The Merchants play again Saturday, at home, weather permitting. Vickers said he plans to set out 60 chairs.

The Ceasefire Held Another Week. We Still Haven’t Called It a War.

Margaret Thorne
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The Ceasefire Held Another Week. We Still Haven’t Called It a War.

What do you call six weeks of airstrikes, three carrier groups, a downed fighter, a foreign capital under blackout, and a Situation Room that has ordered so much Panera the receipts are being FOIA’d? At Eliza’s on Saturday, we called it hostilities. We extended the ceasefire on Monday. We did not extend the vocabulary.

The dinner was small on purpose. Eliza does not do large in a news cycle. There were eight of us at the table — a former ambassador, two Hill staffers of opposing parties who had clearly ridden over together, a defense reporter’s husband, my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has stopped pretending she is not tired, and a lobbyist I will only describe as bipartisan, because he is, and because the description embarrasses him in precisely the way I intend.

The ceasefire came up between the first and second courses, which is where things come up at Eliza’s. The bipartisan lobbyist said the extension was, and I am quoting, ‘a durable off-ramp.’ One of the Hill staffers said it was ‘fragile but holding.’ The other said ‘fragile but holding.’ The former ambassador said ‘fragile.’ It went around the table like grace.

I asked, because someone has to, what we would be calling the last six weeks if the other side had done it to us. The bipartisan lobbyist examined his cufflink. Eliza said, ‘Margaret, please.’ The defense reporter’s husband said the word was ‘kinetic engagement,’ and then, when nobody laughed, said he had heard it from a briefer and thought it was funny at the time.

Judy, who does not offer opinions in mixed company because she has read the memos twenty years from now and knows how they end, said only that the Archives had already been asked, informally, what the retention schedule was for ‘operational correspondence adjacent to a non-declared action.’ She said this the way she asks whether anyone wants more bread. Nobody wanted more bread.

Here is what I keep turning over. A ceasefire is a thing you extend between wars. If we are extending one, we had one. If we had one, someone should be permitted to say so out loud, in a chamber, on a record, under the coat of arms that pretends to require it. Instead we have six weeks of press briefings in which the word ‘hostilities’ has been doing the work of a word we are afraid of, and a Senate that has treated the whole business the way my building treats a broken elevator — with a printed sign and a shrug.

The Hill staffer of the party currently in the majority told me, quietly, near the sideboard, that a war-powers vote had been drafted four times and pulled four times, and that the fourth time it was pulled by a member who is on television twice a week describing himself as a hawk. I asked whether the member would say so on the record. The staffer looked at me as though I had asked whether the lamb had been sourced ethically.

The lamb, incidentally, had been sourced ethically. Eliza mentioned it twice. It was the only item at the table that enjoyed unanimous consent. The bipartisan lobbyist said the ceasefire would probably hold through the summer, which was the first thing anyone said all evening that sounded like a prediction and not a prayer. Judy asked for the recipe.

We are going to extend this again in six weeks. Someone at the podium will say fragile. Someone in the chamber will say durable. Someone on cable will say kinetic. Judy will file whatever we let her file, in whatever box we let her file it in, and in thirty years a graduate student will open the box and learn that the country fought a war between April and — well, that is the part we haven’t decided yet, because we haven’t decided we fought one.

The lamb was excellent. We asked for the recipe. We called it the lamb course, because that was a thing we were willing to name.

$2B AI Hedge Fund Admits Its Model Is Just ChatGPT With a Bloomberg Login

Cody Thompson
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$2B AI Hedge Fund Admits Its Model Is Just ChatGPT With a Bloomberg Login

NEW YORK — Meridian Alpha Capital, the $2.1 billion long/short fund that raised its last round on the strength of a proprietary AI stack it called “asymmetric conviction at machine speed,” disclosed in a Friday LP letter that the model is, in fact, a $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription running on a Dell laptop plugged into a Bloomberg terminal in an unmarked broom closet on the 34th floor.

The closet, according to the letter, is shared with a mop and a case of LaCroix that expired in November.

Meridian’s founding partners had spent the last eighteen months describing the system in pitch meetings as a “multi-agent transformer architecture with real-time market cognition,” a phrase which allocators at three separate pensions repeated back verbatim without asking follow-up questions. In practice, the letter concedes, the architecture is an associate named Marco who arrives at 5:40 a.m., pastes the overnight FX tape into a chat window, and types “thoughts?”

“We were told there was a model,” said Dev Ranganathan, a senior consultant at Beacon Strategy who advises two of the fund’s larger investors and who was eating a cold egg sandwich when reached by phone. “There is a model. It’s the same model everyone has. It has a Bloomberg login now. That’s the differentiation.”

The Bloomberg login, per the letter, is shared across the trading desk and is currently signed in as an analyst who left the firm in August.

Marco’s prompt, obtained by two people familiar with the workflow, opens with the phrase “You are a legendary macro trader who has never been wrong,” instructs the model to “think like Druckenmiller in 1992,” and closes with “do not hedge, do not use the word ‘nuanced.'” The output is then screenshotted, pasted into a Google Doc titled “IDEAS_FINAL_v7_USE THIS ONE,” and read aloud at the 7:15 meeting by a portfolio manager who nods thoughtfully at his own slides.

Returns, remarkably, are up 14% year-to-date, a fact the letter attributes to “the model’s evolving conviction framework” and which one LP attributes to “buying Nvidia, like everyone else who is up 14%.”

Reaction among Meridian’s institutional investors has been measured. A representative for a Midwestern teachers’ pension said the fund’s disclosure was “a helpful clarification” and confirmed the pension would not be pulling its capital, citing lockup provisions, redemption gates, and the fact that no one on the investment committee wants to explain to the board what a system prompt is.

A second LP, reached at a Marriott in Tampa, said he was “honestly relieved” the model was ChatGPT and not “one of the weirder ones.”

Meridian’s founders are currently raising a Series C at a $4 billion valuation on the strength of what the deck describes as “a defensible moat in prompt engineering.” The deck features a chart with no y-axis and a photograph of Marco, cropped from the shoulders up, captioned “Head of Model Ops.” The closet does not appear.

UCLA Hung 79 on South Carolina and My Ham Went Cold

Duke Holloway
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UCLA Hung 79 on South Carolina and My Ham Went Cold

Denise put the ham on the table at six sharp. UCLA was up twenty-two at the half and I hadn’t stood up since tip. She said grace over an empty chair. I said grace over Lauren Betts pulling a second defender to the block and kicking it out to the corner like she’d been doing it since Nixon. Different denominations, same holiday.

Seventy-nine to fifty-one. On Easter Sunday. In a national championship game. I have watched a lot of basketball in my life, and I am here to tell you that the beating UCLA put on South Carolina yesterday was the closest thing to a public execution the NCAA has staged in the modern era, and I’ve seen the 1990 championship game, which is saying something.

Now, before we go any further: South Carolina is a program. Dawn Staley has forgotten more basketball than three of the podcasts I’m forced to overhear at the diner know collectively. This wasn’t a bad team getting exposed. This was a good team running into a buzzsaw on the wrong Sunday of the calendar year, and the buzzsaw happened to be a six-foot-seven post player with better footwork than most centers I coached against in the ’80s who were grown men with mustaches.

I called Ray Kowalczyk at halftime. Ray coached girls’ varsity for thirty-one years in a district that thought the girls’ program was a line item. I said, Ray, are you watching this. He said, Duke, I’ve been watching this since Cheryl Miller. I said, fair. He said, you know what the difference is. I said what. He said, they’re allowed to be good now. Nobody’s telling them to be nice about it. Then he had to go because his grandson was FaceTiming him about a bunny.

Here’s what I loved. Not one UCLA player, after the whistle, did the thing where they run to a camera and point at a logo. Nobody pulled a phone out of a sock. Cori Close hugged her staff for about a full minute like a woman who’d been trying to win this thing for twenty-two years, which she had. The confetti fell. Nobody plugged an app. Nobody thanked their sleep coach. It was, and I’m reaching for a word I don’t use much anymore, dignified.

The sideline reporter did ask Betts what it “means for her brand,” which is a sentence Coach DiMaggio would have driven his Buick into a tree to avoid hearing. DiMaggio used to say a player is a player and a product is a product and you can tell which one you’ve got by whether they’ll set a hard screen when nobody’s filming. Betts set about forty hard screens in that game. Zero of them will trend. All of them won a championship.

The men’s game is tonight and I will watch it, and I will complain, and there will be a graphic on the screen the whole time telling me how many points somebody needs to hit for a parlay I did not place. But I want to say, on the record, in ink, that the best basketball game I saw this tournament, and the best coached, and the best played, and the least embarrassing, was played by a bunch of twenty-year-olds on a Sunday when the rest of the country was arguing about whether the deviled eggs had enough paprika. UCLA didn’t just win. They played the game the way it’s supposed to be played, which is like it matters and like the other team is standing right there.

Ray called back after the buzzer. He said, Duke, are you gonna write something nice for once. I said I might. He said don’t strain anything. Then his grandson took the phone and told me about the bunny.

Denise reheated the ham in the microwave, which she says is a sin and did anyway. She’s bringing the leftovers to her sister’s tomorrow. She says her sister listens to a podcast about ham.

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