Hawkeyes Headed to Final Four

Caitlin Clark raced to get the game ball.

It had been in her hands throughout the game, a tool in one of the most magical performances in NCAA women’s tournament history, and Clark, Iowa’s All-American guard, wanted to keep it.

So, as time ran out in Sunday’s 97-83 win over Louisville in the Seattle Regional 4 final, Clark grabbed it and made sure no one was going to take it away.

“I did want the game ball,” Clark said. “So I chucked it to my dad. I hope they got out of the arena in time so the NCAA couldn’t chase him down. I told him to run, and I’ll get it later at the hotel.”

The ball belonged to her, and so did history.

Clark had 41 points, 10 rebounds, and 12 assists, the first 40-point triple-double in NCAA tournament history, leading the Hawkeyes (30-6) to the Final Four next weekend in Dallas, their first Final Four trip since 1993.

The true impact of the moment seemed elusive after the game.

“I don’t know if it’s really sunk in yet,” coach Lisa Bluder said.

Clark delivered an echo.

“Like Coach Bluder said, it hasn’t really sunk in yet and it probably won’t for a while,” she said.

Clark said when she committed to the Hawkeyes that she wanted to take them to where they’re now going, and she has delivered.

“The only people who believed are me and (Bluder), when I first committed to her,” Clark said. “It was getting the locker room to believe, and then everybody in the locker room believed, and the rest is kind of history.”

History, indeed.

It was Clark’s 11th career triple-double, and it was her finest at what was the most important point of the season.

“It’s funny, the better the opponent, almost the better she plays,” Bluder said. “It’s like she locks in on those when we’re playing against top-25 teams. Her statistics go up even more against great opponents.”

“I just think she is the most complete player.”

The Cardinals weren’t interested in finding adjectives to describe Clark’s performance.

“Yeah, she played a good game,” guard Mykasa Robinson said. “Yeah. She hit some shots. Good job.”

“I’m not sure what you want them to say,” Louisville coach Jeff Walz quickly interjected. “I mean, she played well. She played great. I mean, hats off. I’m a huge Caitlin fan. She played really well. So I don’t know what you want them to say besides that.”

Clark said plenty, and so did the Hawkeyes after a slow start.

They were down 8-0 with 2 minutes, 15 seconds gone in the game. Iowa called a timeout, and Louisville’s Hailey Van Lith, who had six of those points, went toward her bench but not before shouting and gesturing at the crowd.

The display was just a matinee, because the Clark show was about to begin. Iowa scored 25 points in the rest of the quarter, and Clark either scored them herself or had the assist on a teammate’s field goal.

“We were down 8-0, but we’re lucky enough that we have a group that is old enough to understand that it’s not going to bother us,” Clark said. “We came out and changed our defense. And from there we played really good basketball.”

“I think we are such a veteran team, we all just kind of knew we had to stay true to ourselves, and just be ourselves in that moment,” senior forward McKenna Warnock said. “You could falter — that really could have blown up worse than it did. And I’m really proud of this group.”

The Hawkeyes led 48-43 at halftime, and after the Cardinals scored the first four points of the second half, Iowa took over. The Hawkeyes outscored Louisville 30-12 the rest of the half, and when the lead got to 85-63 midway through the fourth quarter, the promise that Clark made and Bluder embraced was about to happen.

Iowa shot 53.7 percent for the game, 52.2 percent in the second half.

There was the bittersweet emotion of the win coming on the same day that the Hawkeyes got the news that the father of associate head coach Jan Jensen had died after a lengthy illness.

“She is just the epitome of an amazing person, an amazing coach,” center Monika Czinano said. “And so to see her go through that, it’s obviously super-tough, especially in one of the highs of all of our lives. But her dad's dream was to see us do this, and so we knew we had to see it through for that, and I believe he was there with us every step of the way.”

Walz embraced Bluder after the win, telling her to appreciate what her team had accomplished.

“I told her, I go, ‘This is a lot harder to accomplish than a lot of people think it is,’” Walz said. “And I told her to make sure she enjoys every second of it, enjoys the moment, make sure you take time to actually take a step back and look at what you've done because it's hard. It is really, really hard.”

The moments were already being appreciated by the Hawkeyes.

“When you dream and work really hard,” Clark said, “a lot of really cool things can happen.”