If you’re a sports media nerd, Sunday was an interesting day. The dominant sports programming was, of course, the NFL, with the day’s signature game at 4:25 p.m. ET on Fox featuring the Baltimore Ravens in a must-win situation against the Dallas Cowboys, who are forever the league’s ratings jewel. That made what aired on ABC in the afternoon particularly noteworthy: a 3 p.m. tipoff pitting the Connecticut Sun against Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever. The game was Clark’s first postseason appearance: her league’s ratings unicorn.

ESPN and the WNBA have never had an opening round of postseason play with this kind of interest, so I was curious to see how the network would handle it. If you want credit for growing the league, as ESPN management always does, these are the games where viewers need you to help drive the conversation. To ESPN’s credit, they largely did that on Sunday.

The network sent its top WNBA broadcast team to Connecticut — Ryan Ruocco, Rebecca Lobo and Holly Rowe — to cover the game, and prior to tipoff, ABC aired a 30-minute episode of “WNBA Countdown.” That pregame show provides value for viewers, including what’s already a major storyline in this short series: The Fever entered the postseason with a total of 19 playoff games across its entire roster, while the Sun had players with a total of 222 career postseason games. “WNBA Countdown” delivered what it typically does more often than not — smart, entertaining conversations between host Elle Duncan and analysts Andraya Carter and Chiney Ogwumike. It reaffirms that it’s time for ESPN to air a daily WNBA in-studio show on one of its networks during the WNBA season, and let’s hope the company finally does so by 2025.

Ruocco, Lobo and Lowe were strong as usual. Lobo informed the crowd right at tipoff to consider DeWanna Bonner as Clark’s primary defender. “These teams played four times in the regular season; DeWanna Bonner was no match for Caitlin Clark in those first four games,” Lobo said. Ruocco was quick to recognize in the opening minute what he rightly called an “outrageous call” by the officials to call a phantom foul on Aliyah Boston that should have been called on Lexie Hull. (The officials eventually corrected their mistake after a foul call.)

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— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) September 22, 2024

The broadcast team called it as you would expect from a national network: right up the middle. No hesitation in noting a clear Clark-pushing foul on DiJonai Carrington in the third quarter. Sun guard Marina Mabrey went off in the second half (she had 20 second-half points and finished with 27, a record for a substitute in WNBA postseason history), and the broadcast caught her at the end of the third quarter, which is a quality entry. The fourth quarter was blowout city. Producer Ian Gruca and director Adam Bryant delivered a quality production, though the production company did this game off-site (the opening rounds are produced from studios in Bristol, Conn., and Charlotte, N.C.), and let’s hope ESPN sends its production team to the game site for future early-round games.

Tipoff time meant the game also ran into an early window of NFL games, including a Fox broadcast of the Philadelphia Eagles-New Orleans Saints that likely drew a significant number of viewers. (It was the only ABC game of the opening round.) It’s not ideal, of course, but it is what it is. You can’t escape the NFL with so much postseason inventory. When the viewership comes out Monday — I expect it to be high, even with Connecticut’s 93-69 blowout — it will be interesting to extrapolate the data against NFL competition.

ESPN’s WNBA regular season was the most-watched for games on ESPN Networks’ airwaves (including ABC), with games averaging 1.2 million viewers — a huge jump from last year’s games (440,000 viewers). The league has had 22 regular-season games average more than 1 million viewers, and if you add in the WNBA All-Star Game and the WNBA Draft, that makes it 24 programming events during the 2024 calendar year that have drawn more than 1 million viewers (Clark has been a part of all but three of those windows, according to Sports Media Watch). Sunday’s game will be a different one.

Game 2 is Wednesday with the same broadcast crew. The game will air on ESPN, with tips at 7:30 p.m. ET. Here’s a sobering thought for ESPN executives and WNBA fans: This could be the last time we see Clark this season.

Ruocco pondered that possibility when I reached him after his phone call Sunday afternoon. “I’ll certainly think about it in terms of the context of the journey that Caitlin has been on, and not just this entire WNBA season, but the college season leading up to it,” he said. “We’ve had basically 12 months of meaningful, compelling basketball from Caitlin Clark. It’s almost going to feel strange to go through a period of time where we don’t have her to engage us and entertain us, because she’s been such a central force over the past year, not just in the sports world but culturally in our country.

“With Caitlin, every game there’s a realization of how big it is to document her career,” he added. “She’s had an impact on team sports, metrics-wise, maybe like we’ve never seen before. You want to make sure that every game you do with her, you have those supporting examples. Even today, when she scored her first point, I made sure to mention that it was her first playoff points of her career, because she’s the kind of player that maybe 10 years from now we want to look back at.”

(Photo: Chris Marion/NBAE via Getty Images)