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MORGANTOWN -- West Virginia's women's basketball team hopes not only to dominate the present when it opens play in this year's NCAA basketball championships as the Mountaineers take on Princetown in the 8/9 game that figures to be as close as the seedings on Saturday evening.
But they also hope to take a big taste of the future, for they find themselves caught up in a moment of time when women's sports -- including collegiate basketball -- is making a quantum leap forward in capturing the imagination of the American sports fan.
Should the Mountaineers advance, they would be looking into the face of college basketball, the face that belongs to Caitlin Clark, who this year has dominated the game as she became college basketball's all-time leading scorer, male or female, and still is adding to that total before heading for the WNBA next year.
She has sold arenas across the land and has been a major television draw. Last year, while losing the NCAA championship game to LSU, ABC and ESPN2 had more than 10 million viewers, a record for an NCAA women's game, and this year she has outdrawn the NBA in viewers as she chased and passed Pete Maravich's individual scoring record.
It is a shame that the NCAA has not yet caught up with the growth of women's sports and has not yet felt sure enough of its attendance to set up its tournament as it does for the men, with neutral court sites rather than putting teams such as Iowa at home and making either WVU or Princeton play Clark in front of a roaring home crowd.
The day, though, seems to be coming when the sport will arrive at the point where it can do away with that home-court advantage.
"I think we're getting close to that," WVU coach Mark Kellogg said the other day. "Women's basketball is trending in that direction, for sure. I don't know if we're there yet but this is the closest we've ever been without question.
"I see some of the conference tournaments in neutral sites and the crowds they are drawing, I think we have opportunities to go to neutral sites pretty soon. When that is, I'm not sure but we are closer now than we ever have been with the excitement of women's basketball."
It's been a long, hard climb for women's sports to reach equality going back to 1972 when Title IX was passed, with a lot of milestones along the way from Billy Jean King's victory in tennis over Bobby Riggs in "The Battle of the Sexes," to Team USA's women's soccer success, to Mary Lou Retton's Olympics, the founding and success of the WNBA, to Coco Gauff's rise in professional tennis.
And now, should WVU beat Princeton, they will be thrust into one of those moments that could bring the glare of the national spotlight upon them and turn women's basketball at WVU into a money making proposition.
But it's going to be a different experience for them as they face Iowa and Clark.
"We have not played in anything like we will see Saturday," Kellogg said. "That's a neutral-floor game, but the fan base they have built there with Caitlin Clark, who is the face of it, they have something unbelievably special. I think I saw they sold out every home game this year.
"They play before us (on Saturday at 2 p.m. while WVU is scheduled for the second game), so I imagine a big contingent will stay around and I imagine they'll want to watch and see who Iowa plays on that Monday. The environment will be good and whoever wins will have a crazy environment on Monday night there."
Adding to the spectacle, of course, was the social media attention to Kellogg's "send Caitlin Clark packing" comment, which is sure to bring out the jeers when he takes the court Saturday and, if WVU advances, on Monday night.
As for the players, it just adds to the tensions that come with March Madness.
"I think March is always different just because you need to win to advance," WVU's Lauren Fields said. "I've been in the tournament before so I can use that to my advantage. You can use the idea that you need to win to go on as motivation."
But this will be different if she gets to go face to face with Clark and Iowa. Her previous biggest crowds, she said, were when she was at Arizona and played Arizona State in a rivalry game.
But when the national spotlight is on you?
"We'll just be all excited to be part of that and to be talked about," Fields said.