Caitlin Clark will either push the WNBA past barriers or lay them bare

It is Clark, and Clark alone, who is all the rage.

For further proof, the Washington Mystics announced Tuesday that its June 7 home game against the Indiana Fever, which last week drafted Clark first overall, sold out — in three hours. That after the game was moved from the Mystics’ 4,200-seat Entertainment and Sports Arena across the Anacostia to the Wizards’ 20,356-seat Capital One Arena in the heart of downtown. The Mystics were the second WNBA team to move a home date with Clark’s Fever to a larger venue. All of this after three NCAA tournament games Clark played in this season set viewership records for the sport.

Meanwhile, the Mystics have not announced doing the same when in July they are scheduled to host the Phoenix Mercury, whose roster includes two of the most-famous women’s basketball players in the world in Brittney Griner and Diana Taurasi. There is no need. The duo may not sell out the ESA.

Of course, unless you’ve been living the past year on Bouvet Island, you know the myriad reasons for the phenomenon that is Clark. She injected basketball’s most-recent revolution of the really deep three-point shot into the women’s game. Her signature shot is called the Logo 3, because she often shoots from the border of any half-court floor artwork. And she does so with such remarkable accuracy that she’s scaled the mountain of college scoring — almost to its peak where a lower-division player, Pearl Moore, planted her flag almost a half-century ago. But a misogynist NCAA didn’t acknowledge women’s sports then, which left most of us unaware of Moore’s achievements until Clark’s accomplishments got fact-checked this past season.

Clark’s leap into the national mainstream truly launched with the 2023 NCAA title game. Before that, she wasn’t selling out every arena or generating the record-breaking television viewership. But after the showdown with LSU star Angel Reese, Clark became a bankable star, which is not surprising given the history race has always played in sports in this country when it comes to popularity or villainy.

For there was Clark, an austere representative of great White Midwestern values. And there was Reese, from the Baltimore area, which gave us “The Wire,” as an exemplar of everything that is Black urban aesthetics, living up to her adopted and trademarked nickname Bayou…