South Carolina Gamecocks

CLEVELAND – If the hair did not raise up on your neck, if something in your chest did not swell, you were insensate. This was a game that, for all the divided loyalties and warring ambitions between South Carolina and Iowa, offered something that binds. It was decades in the thankless making for women’s basketball, so when the acclamation finally came pouring down like the clouds of confetti Sunday afternoon, it seemed fitting that the champion cutting down the net was a pioneering coach in Dawn Staley, whose tremendous Gamecocks held off the NCAA Division I all-time scoring leader in the rightly celebrated Caitlin Clark, 87-75, to finish 38-0.