A thrashing. With trash talk.

Give the LSU Tigers this much: They brought their A-plus game on the A-plus day.

Caitlin Clark of Iowa did her Steph Curry deal, splashing eight threes from Neptune on the way to a 30-point, eight-assist afternoon in the women's national championship game. But it didn't matter a whit. She could have shot long into the night and it wouldn't have tilted the scoreboard, because LSU was not going to be beaten by her or anyone else on this day.

Fifty-four percent shooting? 

Ridiculous.

Eleven 3-pointers in 17 attempts (64.7 percent)?

Absurd.

A record 102 points in a national championship game?

You're kidding, right?

And so Kim Mulkey started to cry over there with 90 seconds to play, and Alexis Morris kept hitting jumpers and LaDazhia Williams and Angel Reese kept taking it to the tin, and an old-fashioned down-home thrashing ensued. The Tigers, who led by 17 at the half, won by 17. And then confetti fell and they were lifting the big trophy just two years after Mulkey came to Baton Rouge from Baylor, returning to her Louisiana roots.

LSU's women were 9-13 two seasons ago. They were 26-6 in Mulkey's first season, 34-2 this year. And they finished it off with a performance that might have out-glittered Mulkey's sparkly title-game pantsuit, which passing Romulans probably could have seen from space.

It was a team reflective of big-wheel college athletics’ new reality, for better or for worse. A whole pile of LSU's players came here from somewhere else, including Reese (Maryland, 15 points and 10 rebounds in the title game), graduate transfer LaDazhia Williams (Missouri, 20 points, five boards), Jasmine Carson (West Virginia, 22 points and 5-of-6 from the arc off the bench), Kateri Poole (Ohio State,  six points and three rebounds) and Morris, a fifth-year senior playing for her fourth school (Baylor, Rutgers, Texas A&M, LSU; 21 points and nine assists).

Call them Rent-A-Champions, then, if you're so inclined. But they're pretty much doing what everyone does in the era of the transfer portal. Best get used to it.

Best get used to watching women's buckets now, too, because a lot of people did. So much so, that Clark went viral with her Steph-back threes and swagger, and Reese went viral with the sort of intertoobz firestorm that only happens when people are paying attention.

I'm talking, of course, about Reese looking at Clark and pointing to her ring finger when the game was done, and then doing the whole John Cena "You can't see me" hand-waving in front of her face.

It was playground taunting and utterly classless given the setting, and Reese, who is black, was roundly and rightly bashed for it. What wasn't so right was that Reese stole the Cena thing from Clark, who is white and did the same bit last week.

Social media never uttered a peep about that bit of classless taunting. And (mea culpa) that includes the guy driving this Blob.

So it blew up, of course, the way everything blows up these days. But you know what?

Just a few years ago it wouldn't have. Because America, or a good chunk of it anyway, wouldn't have been tuning in.

Call it progress.