re: Up until 2022, NCAA WBB teams were not allowed to have tournament brackets

The women made up clandestine brackets anyway, scratching them in the dirt by the light of the full moon while their overseers slept. Drawing from ancient, female-centered spaces like astrology and oral history, many of these brackets were in fact superior to the computerized brackets of the big money men's tourney.

A rich (if underground) tradition of ethnically diverse and size-inclusive bobblehead giveaways took hold, offering a welcome counterpoint to, for instance, the Marcel Ozuna bobblehead once foisted on us by the Atlanta Br*ves- a plastic, dead-eyed tribute to a convicted abuser of women of color. Some years, these pioneering women even experimented with an ultra-inclusive "round robin" format that women's coach Pokey Chatman once described as "kinda like an ol' hippy-arse drum circle, but with free throws. Like hackysack for black girls."

NBA legend Greg Popovich is one of the few men willing to talk on record about the "Apartheid" (as he described it) of pre-2022 amateur basketball.

"The problem," Popovich opined, "is that most people care more about Dwyane Wade than Roe v. Wade. We've got a narcissistic frat boy trying to rip the country apart, and women weren't even allowed to play basketball until two years after we kicked his arse out. There's something profoundly wrong with that."