A carnival atmosphere descended on Climate Pledge Arena Thursday night as the Seattle Storm hosted rookie phenom Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever for the second time this season. Clark’s inaugural WNBA season is being trumpeted as a turning point for professional women’s basketball. ESPN viewership numbers confirm as much, as did Thursday’s sellout crowd, the Storm’s third ever full house after Clark’s Seattle debut this May and Sue Bird’s last regular season home game in 2022.

Winners of four championships—tied for the most in league history—the Storm, one of the WNBA’s premier franchises, are in the midst of a turning-point season themselves. They posted the second-worst winning percentage in franchise history in 2023 but decided against a rebuild, signing free agents Skylar Diggins-Smith and Nneka Ogwumike to consolidate their core of Jewell Loyd and Ezi Magbegor. Sitting pat at 11-6, the fourth best record in the league, the strategy has paid dividends. The 2023 Loyd show (she set the WNBA’s single season points record) has given way to balanced scoring and a vastly improved defense. Last night, the Storm seemed intent on proving something to the crowd, many of whom were fully bought into the Clark hoopla.

Teenage girls sporting Indiana Fever gear gathered on a stage outside the KEXP Gathering Space an hour before gametime, snapping photos with the arena in the background. A roving group of older fans wore matching “It’s a Caitlin Thing” tees. In a city with limited Iowan affiliation, Hawkeyes logos abounded, as fans repped Clark's alma mater.

The Pences, retirees who relocated from Iowa to Enumclaw, Washington, in 2019, were attending their first ever Storm Game. They’ve followed Clark since she was on the Midwest high school circuit, and previously traveled to attend her March Madness games. “The WNBA is really current,” they said. “Everyone’s following it.”

Storm season ticket holder Jeremy Tags Tarpey, 37, an area office manager, said he initially thought to sell his seats at a premium. “It’s a different crowd here, because of all these Clark fans.” He wound up attending based on the “energy” he’d seen during Clark’s first Seattle visit, a narrow Storm victory on May 22. “This is a really exciting season for the Storm. Horston is playing great,” he said, referring to Jordan Horston, the team’s second-year wing.

With the Breanna Stewart and Sue Bird years in the rearview, the Storm are taking another swing at contention after a single down season. The Fever, meanwhile, haven’t made the playoffs since 2017. Still, the Fever need only look to Storm franchise history to see that a team must suffer to succeed. Futile Storm campaigns in the early aughts led to draft selections Bird and Lauren Jackson. A poor season in 2015 resulted in Stewart. The Fever, selecting first in each of the last two drafts, have a bright future with Clark and University of South Carolina standout Aliyah Boston.

On Thursday, the Storm showed traveling Fever fans that the future might be a ways off. Loyd put the jets on early with a trio of first quarter three-pointers and 23 first half points. She would finish with a season-high 34. Magbegor added 18, and Ogwumike—named one of the league’s top 25 all-time players in 2021—added an efficient 15 along with three blocks, three steals, and 11 rebounds. NBA star Damian Lillard sat courtside.

With Seattle’s hot shooting and swarming defense, Clark supporters mustered limited enthusiasm for their gravitational star. Clark’s name has been a permanent headline of late, and not always for basketball reasons. “Can’t people just shut up and watch women dribble?” asked Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah. “Given that the WNBA is more than 60 percent Black, it’s hard not to feel like the new fans are using Clark as a proxy for their own issues and attitudes about race, sexuality, and gender.”

Clark herself has been preternaturally mature amid the media circus. To watch her on the court, even in a losing battle, explains part of her popularity. She catapults shots from extraordinary angles and distances, often while moving to her left. She flings one-handed passes with an ease and confidence that would get lesser players benched. Because Clark attended home state Iowa as opposed to a larger program, her college career was an endless David versus Goliath parable, like watching Hoosiers on repeat— and David came out ahead nearly every time.

Storm fans might rightfully balk at the flock of newcomers who turned out Thursday to watch a first-year player score 15 points on nine shots. After all, the WNBA has thrived here for a long time without Caitlin Clark. But so far this year, typical home game attendance has been in the neighborhood of 8,500. At Fever games, that number has more than doubled. The hope is that, Clark or no Clark, attendance can meet somewhere in the middle. This would be a win for longtime fans, for the Seattle Center, and most importantly, for the Storm, a proud franchise deserving of our support. In that regard, the loudest applause on Thursday came as arena cameras panned courtside to a smiling Bird and her wife, Megan Rapinoe. Caitlin Clark might be this year’s basketball sensation. But here in Seattle, royalty is royalty.