Women's March Madness is red-hot, and Canadians are part of the show

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The annual college-basketball/office-gambling extravaganza that is March Madness officially tipped off this afternoon. While the NCAA men's bracket remains a cultural juggernaut, generating billions of dollars in broadcast revenue and billions more in wagering (much of it by people who haven't watched a minute of college hoops all year), it's the women's tournament that now seems to have all the juice.

Things had been trending in this direction for a while, but the women's game truly went viral last spring — thanks mostly to Caitlin Clark. The Steph Curry-esque sensation shot Iowa to the national championship game almost single-handedly, dropping a 41-point triple-double on Louisville to send her team to the Final Four before pouring in another 41 to upset undefeated South Carolina in the semifinals. Clark added 30 in the title game to set a new tournament record of 191 total points (in six games), but the Hawkeyes got trounced by rugged LSU.

The story didn't end there, though. A million social-media and sports-debate-show takes were launched when, in the closing moments of the final, LSU star Angel Reese taunted Clark by doing that "you can't see me" hand gesture popularized by the wrestler John Cena and pointing to an imaginary championship ring on her finger. Clark had done the hand thing herself during the Louisville game, but extremely online people on both sides of the debate spent days arguing whether Reese had crossed the line of poor sportsmanship. The fact that Reese is black and Clark is white added more fuel to the outrage inferno.

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