An impact of some description

 Sometime a couple days from now, Caitlin Clark will splash another galactic three-ball for the Iowa Hawkeyes, and suddenly Pete Maravich will be No. 2 on college basketball's alltime scoring list, men or women.

No. 1 will be Clark.

Old men shouting at clouds will shout at clouds over this, saying she had four years and Pete only got three, and, anyway, there was no 3-point line then so the numbers don't track. Also, you can't compare the men's and women's games because they're not the same, and they never will be.

None of this will keep Caitlin Clark and Iowa from selling out whatever arena they play in next.

None of it will keep her chunky sponsorship deals with State Farm and others from following her to the WNBA.

None of it will keep the Indiana Fever from making her the first pick in the upcoming WNBA draft, now that Clark has announced she's forgoing her last season at Iowa to turn pro. Nor will it keep her from being the biggest thing to hit Indianapolis since the Colts landed in town 40 years ago.

She's a bonafide phenomenon, Clark is, and we can debate forever whether she's also the greatest player in women's college history. Hell, the way freshmen Juju Watkins at USC and Hannah Hidalgo up at Notre Dame are going, her scoring records may not last more than four years. It happens. It's why the most naive thing you can say in Sportsball World is "We'll never see another (insert name here)."

News flash: There's always another (insert name here). All you gotta do is stick around and wait.

However.

However, Caitlin Mania is real, and until it gets supplanted by (Insert Name Here) Mania,  it's unlike anything we've ever seen. The women's college game didn't need much lifting; successful programs in basketball-centric places like Tennessee or UConn or Indiana now routinely draw crowds in the double-digit thousands for their games. But Caitlin Mania has taken the women's game, and America's awareness of it, into an entirely different stratosphere.

Or maybe you missed what happened in Bloomington last week, when Iowa came to play the superb Indiana women's team and the line to get in stretched all the way around Assembly Hall.

This being the Basketball State, they were partly queuing up to see if Indiana could take down the No 5 Hawkeyes (which Indiana did, and convincingly). But they were queuing up to see if Indiana could take down Caitlin Clark. No Clark, no line stretching around the Hall.

I don't know if the same thing will happen in Indy this summer. I suspect it will.

I also don't know if Clark will have the same impact on the WNBA she did on the college game. That's a lot to put on the slender shoulders of a 22-year-old who's yet to play a professional game. And the truth is, she's not likely to step right in and start lighting up, say, the New York Liberty the way she lit up Minnesota or Michigan or Illinois.

The pros will body her. They'll take away her favorite spots. They'll be quicker and stronger and more savvy than the Gophers or Wolverines or Illini she's used to schooling.

In other words, the chances of her stepping in and taking over the WNBA the way she's taken over college buckets are slim and none. She'll have a target on her back you can see from space, for one thing. And if the pro game for women is not quite as radically different as the pro game is for men, it's still different.

However.

However, she'll be really, really good, and she'll be really, really good from the jump. And she'll be huge in Indy, because, again, this is the Basketball State. And if the WNBA, like the women's college game, doesn't need lifting, she'll still have an impact of some description -- and already has.

See what happened yesterday, mere hours after Clark announced she would enter the WNBA draft?

Ticket prices for what will now be Clark's final game at Iowa jumped to an average of $557 according to TickPick,com. 

Meanwhile, web searches for "Indiana Fever" immediately spiked after Clark's announcement.

Stay tuned, on other words. Stay tuned.