As fans swarmed outside her bus, cheering and waving homemade signs while television cameras rolled, Caitlin Clark realized she was in her pajamas.

She had been so exhausted by her pursuit of a championship that she hadn’t considered what awaited at the end of the ride. After a long few weeks away, Clark was back in Iowa, the only state she had ever called home, a place she had always loved and one that had come to love her back. What she did not initially grasp was just how much that had intensified while she was away.

Clark was returning to the same state but a different world.

This was the aftermath of the 2023 NCAA tournament for Iowa women’s basketball. An electrifying run had ended in the first championship game in program history, and the driving force was Clark, a junior guard who spent the month turning heads and smashing records. No college player, male or female, had scored as much in one tournament. No one had recorded a 40-point tournament triple-double. (Or, for that matter, a 30-point tournament triple-double.) No one had sunk so many postseason threes. Clark had elevated her play into something that felt closer to grand, jaw-dropping theater. She took what she had been doing for years—no-look passes, shots from the logo, tricky maneuvers in traffic—and delivered on the biggest stage. Clark finished short of a title, with Iowa falling to LSU in the final, 102–85. But she helped secure a new kind of attention: Viewership for the women’s national championship set records and doubled year-over-year. Clark had done something the game had never quite seen under a spotlight it had never quite experienced.

And then the bus came to a stop.

Clark found a simple answer for the moment in front of her. (She pulled a sweatshirt on before signing autographs and posing for pictures in her pajama pants.) But there would be plenty more questions. The 21-year-old’s star had been steadily rising over the past three years, and in the space of a few weeks, it had exploded. She now had to figure out what that meant.

And she’d have time to think about it. Clark has never been one to take a break, ease up, relax in any way. But Iowa coach Lisa Bluder told her after the tournament to take some time off—two weeks, at least, without so much as touching a basketball. This directive was partially for physical recovery. But it was more for her mentally. Before conversation grew too loud about what Clark’s performance had meant for women’s basketball, what it meant for women, period, and basketball, period, Bluder wanted to make sure that Clark had time to process what it meant for herself.
 

“She needed to do that,” Bluder says. “I really believe that she needed to have that time just to realize what she did, soak it in and be prepared to do it again.”

So for the next two weeks, Clark did not pick up a basketball, and instead she picked up everything that had come home with her. “I felt like I had collected all these NCAA items,” Clark says. “Like a million things from the whole trip.” The cowboy hat she and her teammates got at the Final Four in Dallas. Mementos from their sightseeing at the Sweet 16 in Seattle. As she unpacked, Clark went through every souvenir and scrap of paper, trying to commit the story of each to memory.
 

“Obviously, I remember the basketball games really well,” Clark says. “But it was all the little experiences in between.”

Those were the parts she wanted to preserve. She wanted to hold on to how it felt to experience this alongside the people she loved most, part of a starting five that had been together for three years, representing the state that had always been her home. Clark had never struggled to visualize how success might look for her on the court. But the rest of this had been harder to imagine.

As her world was getting bigger—as she was getting bigger to the world—she wanted to savor these small pieces.
On a weekday morning early in the fall semester, Clark sits in a nearly empty Carver-Hawkeye Arena. She had spent much of her time this summer in this building—taking hundreds of shots in her daily gym sessions either alone or in small groups. (Off the dribble, cutting to the corners, from half court: As fluid and improvised as Clark’s game can seem, teammates note that she practices everything, with countless reps backing up each of her seemingly magical shots.) That was just like every recent previous summer for her. It was everything else that was different.
 

In August, Iowa announced that it had sold out the entire women’s basketball season: Demand for season tickets was so overwhelming they could not promise any single-game offerings. The Hawkeyes set a record for Big Ten attendance last year. But this was another level. The program had previously sold out just a handful of games in the 15,056-capacity arena, and now it was packing an entire season months before tip-off.

The mania had spread beyond campus, too: When the Triple A Iowa Cubs gave out a Caitlin Clark bobblehead in June, fans started getting in line at 6 a.m. When she played the John Deere Classic Pro-Am in July, just over the border in Silvis, Ill., organizers couldn’t recall a gallery so large since Bill Murray played in 2015. (At the event Clark was paired with U.S. Ryder Cup captain Zach Johnson, who demurred when asked whether she had the game-changing potential of Tiger Woods but called her “transcendent” and “spectacular.”) And Clark received perhaps the biggest honor of all in August: Her likeness was sculpted in butter at the Iowa State Fair.
 

“I mean, people go to the fair just to see the butter sculptures, especially the butter cow,” Clark says. “For me to be next to the butter cow, that’s a pretty big deal.” (Previous butter honorees have included Elvis, John Wayne, Abraham Lincoln and The Last Supper.)

The combined effect has been hard to fathom. That’s true not just for Clark, but for her teammates and coaches, too. Iowa associate head coach Jan Jensen has spent her entire adult life in women’s college basketball, 35 seasons, and she is sometimes bowled over by all that had to happen to allow for this kind of spotlight. “We have been working,” she says, “for moments for people to care.”
Clark wanted those moments, too. Shortly after she committed to Iowa, The Gazettein Cedar Rapids asked the five-star recruit out of West Des Moines why she had chosen the school over traditional bluebloods. “Iowa isn’t a program that has always been to the Final Four,” she said, “and I want to help do something different.” If that was an audacious quote for a player yet to step on campus as a freshman, well, Clark has always been an audacious person. And soon, a banner will be raised to commemorate that she did, in fact, do something different.
 

What she had not realized was how much she would have to change to make it happen.

Clark always chafed at the idea that staying close to home was a sign of modest goals or limited vision. If anything, her path felt more ambitious. Clark did not just want to go to a Final Four. She wanted to do it on her terms, elevating a program she grew up watching, making a team achievement into a state celebration. Clark knew she had options elsewhere. But she wanted this one.