| There have not been many games in 7-foot-2 Donovan Clingan's career where he has been looking up at his opponent.
Such will be the case at 9:20 p.m. tonight when UConn's center will be giving two inches to Purdue center Zach Edey in the feature matchup of the men's basketball national championship game. It's a throwback battle of bigs that could make Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon proud.
But as Clingan and Edey grab the headlines — like this one from The Post's basketball guru Zach Braziller, on-site in Phoenix — as easily as they grab rebounds, here's a reminder of five other storylines in the works during the rare matchup of two No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament final.
1️⃣ White, gray and navy blue (blood): With a win, UConn will move past Duke and Indiana and into a tie with North Carolina for No. 3 all-time in men's basketball with six national championships.
 Since UConn won its first national title in 1999, no D-I men's program has won more than the five titles the Huskies have accumulated.
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If you don't think of the Huskies as a blue-blood program by now, you should rethink your definition.
Since UConn won its first title in 1999 — the same decade as Duke won its first, by the way — blue bloods UCLA (zero), Kentucky (one) and Indiana (zero) have one title combined. During UConn's era of dominance, Duke and North Carolina, with three apiece and Villanova, Kansas and Florida, with two apiece, are the only other programs with multiple titles — and all are a long way from five (or six).
None of the other six teams with four or more titles are undefeated in the final. UConn is looking to improve to 6-0, under three different head coaches no less.
2️⃣ New idea of a nucleus: Of the seven players who played at least seven minutes for UConn in the semifinal, five did not previously play for another college. Six of Purdue's top-seven contributors are homegrown.
In the era of NIL payments and the transfer portal, is this the last NCAA Tournament final that is going to look this way? Or is this an early indication that teams which manage to keep a nucleus together are going to have an advantage moving forward?
Purdue coach Matt Painter sounded off on multi-time transfers moving around the landscape.
 Six of the top seven players in Matt Painter's rotation were original Purdue recruits.
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"If you change three or four times, you don't get your degree, don't become a pro, don't have any [alumni] contacts, you didn't take that opportunity and get any better, then what are we doing for young people?" Painter said before the Final Four. "That doesn't make any sense to me. I don't like anybody that devalues education.
"We've tried to stay the same where we are with it, but I think we're kind of an outlier. … Most everything on movement is not about winning and is not about maybe going to the NCAA Tournament. It's about their role. They want to shoot more, they want to play more. If you have that opportunity to move, then you just want to move again, then you want to move again, the only thing you got good at was moving."
3️⃣ Cam Spencer's magical ride: Four years ago, Spencer was coming off the bench for Loyola (Md.). Two years ago, he was looking to prove he could play at a higher level than the Patriot League, when he transferred to Rutgers.
Now? UConn's Spencer is arguably the third-most important player for the national-title favorites, used in much more of a ball-handling and playmaking role than he was as a 3-point shooter in one season at Rutgers.
 Largely a 3-point specialist at Rutgers, Cam Spencer has evolved into more of a playmaking role at UConn.
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Maybe most of Spencer's improvement (14.4 points and 3.7 assists per game) is due to just playing with better talent around him.
But his development is noteworthy within the context of whether or not Rutgers has the offensive coaching necessary to maximize the once-in-a-fan's-lifetime moment of two of the nation's top-three recruits — High School All-Americans Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey — joining the Scarlet Knights and elevating expectations to unprecedented territory next season.
4️⃣ UConn's balance: Freshman guard Stephon Castle may be the best NBA prospect in the game.
UConn might be reliant on him in the big spot, right?
Ha! This isn't one of John Calipari's Kentucky teams.
Stuck in foul trouble, Castle didn't even play most of the final seven minutes of the semifinal as the door was slammed on Alabama. He checked out with the Huskies leading by eight points with 6:35 remaining and watched from the bench as the lead doubled in size.
5️⃣ Two other matchups to watch:
 Purdue cannot afford to have Braden Smith be reluctant to shoot if it hopes to upend the Huskies in the title game.
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Purdue point guard Braden Smith is coming off a nightmare game, in which he scored three points on 1-of-9 shooting. For most of the second half against North Carolina State, he looked afraid to let open shots fly.
If he gets off to another slow start, what will that do to his confidence? Especially when UConn's point guard and leading scorer Tristen Newton is a proven big shot-maker.
In a matchup of contrasting offensive styles, Purdue plays with a 6-foot-9 post-up power forward in Trey Kaufman-Renn. UConn counters with 6-foot-8 Alex Karaban floating along the perimeter.
Can Karaban defend in the post? Can Kaufman-Renn shuffle his feet in space? Which team will dictate a lineup change to the other?
Today's back page  New York Post
The Caitlin Clark Effect Caitlin Clark's iconic college basketball career ended Sunday on an unsuitably sour note.
Iowa lost the national championship game to undefeated South Carolina in what likely will be revealed as the most-watched women's basketball game of all-time.
It's up to the rest of the sport to make sure that what comes next is sweet.
There is optimism that increasing national interest in women's basketball over the last two years is sustainable and that the new fans who tuned in to see Clark set scoring records and shoot logo 3-pointers at Iowa will follow her to the WNBA when she is inevitably the No. 1 pick in the upcoming draft by the Indiana Fever, stick around to support other women's college stars next season, or both.
 For all the records Caitlin Clark claimed, she was unable to end her career at Iowa with a national championship.
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"This is not just an anomaly but rather the beginning of a new era," Dr. La Quinta Frederick, Georgetown's faculty director and an associate professor in the Sports Industry Management program in the School of Continuing Studies, said recently in a report on the university's website.
As a former Associated Press women's basketball Top 25 and All-Americans voter (2012-18), I am skeptical after hearing some of the same talk — albeit on a much-smaller scale — when stars Elena Della Donne, Brittney Griner and Skylar Diggins had relatively big followings to change the discourse around the UConn-dominated landscape in 2012.
Television ratings suggest the popularity of the women's NCAA Tournament wasn't a steady climb but rather a Clark-created lightning strike. Who doesn't want to see the all-time leading scorer in men's or women's college basketball history reinvent the game like no one has since future Hall of Famer Steph Curry crashed the NBA with his similar range?
The women's national championship game topped 5 million viewers three times between 1999 and 2004, according to sportsmediawatch.com. It didn't reach that level again — and dropped as low as 2.972 million in 2016 — over the next 18 years.
 South Carolina's title-clinching win over Iowa likely will be the most-watched women's basketball game of all-time.
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Clark's first appearance in the final last season coincided with the first ABC national broadcasting of the game (instead of ESPN) and an audience jump from 4.85 million in 2022 to 9.915 million in 2023. And even that viewership still paled in comparison to how many people over the last week watched Iowa-LSU in the Elite Eight (12.3 million) and Iowa-UConn in the Final Four (14.2 million).
Friday's other Final Four matchup between South Carolina and North Carolina State drew an audience of 7.1 million — an impressive number on its own accord, though half the size of the crowd that came to see Clark, and possibly inflated by fans curious to scout Clark's next opponent.
In a way, Clark became an individual in a team sport — more like the great golfer or tennis player than one of 10 players on the court.
Women's basketball made some smart rule changes — switching from two halves to four quarters and adopting the NBA rule where the ball can advance to half-court after a late timeout to increase drama — in 2015. Two years later, the sport wisely ditched the Sunday-Tuesday final-weekend format in favor of Friday-Sunday so its final serves as a precursor Monday's men's basketball final — in the matinee window that the NFL and golf have shown can produce big ratings.
Five of the 10 women's basketball First- and Second-Team All-Americans this season were underclassmen and are likely to return next season. Because they don't typically leave early for the WNBA, and because the transfer portal and NIL paychecks haven't overrun the sport like they have in men's basketball, women's stars are more likely to stay with one team and build fan loyalty over four years.
All of those factors will work in favor of building momentum.
 It's unclear whether or not the fans Clark drew to women's college basketball will remain when she takes her talents to the WNBA.
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But unless some of the returning stars or an incoming recruit finds a way to imitate Clark's unprecedented 3-point bombs and crisp passes, it's a stretch to think that Sunday was not the end of a golden two-year stretch for the NCAA and that responsibility falls now to the WNBA to carry the torch.
Sure enough, Fever single-game home tickets are selling out in minutes and the two-time defending WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces moved a July 2 home game against the Fever from a 12,000-seat arena to an 18,000-seat arena. The cheapest ticket available for the New York Liberty's home opener May 18 against the Fever at Barclays Center is $88 — or $55 more than the cheapest ticket to their second home game when Clark won't be in town.
Yes, there is a Caitlin Clark Effect that will help the sport at one level but hurt it another.
It takes two It happened on Sunday, which was the 11th day of the MLB season for all teams who opened by playing in the United States.
Because of rainouts, cross-country travel and one hot start and one slow start, the Yankees (8-2) and Mets (3-6) finally won on the same day for the first time this season.
More notably moving forward, the victories were powered by two $300 million stars who couldn't have been more in need of big moments.
 Giancarlo Stanton's second homer in two games led the Yankees to a series win over the Blue Jays.
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In the Bronx, Giancarlo Stanton's two-out, two-strike, tie-breaking third-inning grand slam fueled a 6-3 victory against the Blue Jays.
Unlike his home run Saturday night — a pop fly that barely cleared the short right-field porch at Yankee Stadium — Stanton's grand slam was a throwback to his MVP form. He ripped the bat through the strike zone and sent the ball screaming at 110 miles per hour into the left-field seats, 417 feet away.
It should buy one of the most boo-worthy Yankees — given his last two seasons — a little peace and quiet entering a series against his former team (Marlins) when he will be a focal point as the blockbuster 2018 trade is recalled.
Boos are one thing — the right of buying a ticket.
But vile personal attacks like the ones that Francisco Lindor's wife revealed she received from Mets fans during her husband's slow start are never acceptable.
 Francisco Lindor powered the Mets to a rare win early in the season amid reports his wife has been attacked on social media over his struggles at the plate.
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Credit to Lindor for somehow blocking out the noise and fueling the Mets' 3-1 series-clinching road win against the Reds. He broke out of a season-opening 1-for-31 stretch with a double and a home run, scoring two runs.
Mets owner Steve Cohen is hoping that, in light of the disturbing messages aimed at Lindor and his family, fans uplift the shortstop with a standing ovation Monday night when the Mets return to Citi Field to face the Braves, after a similar stunt in Philadelphia sparked a struggling Trea Turner for the Phillies last season.
Win now or hold your piece? Everything about the Jets' offseason so far suggests that general manager Joe Douglas will be inclined to use the No. 10 pick in the NFL Draft on tight end Brock Bowers (if he is available).
Drafting the matchup nightmare Bowers is a win-now move that fits alongside the one-year free-agent contracts given to left tackle Tyron Smith and receiver Mike Williams as well as the trades to rent right tackle Morgan Moses and edge rusher Haason Reddick in their contract walk-years.
It would satisfy 40-year-old quarterback Aaron Rodgers — who was upset that the Packers didn't use a first-round pick on an offensive playmaker over the entirety of his 15 years as the starter — and possibly help generate enough wins this season to get general manager Joe Douglas and head coach Robert Saleh off the hot seat.
 Averaging 14.5 yards per catch in three years at Georgia, tight end Brock Bowers is the kind of weapon any quarterback would welcome.
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"The floor is so high on Brock Bowers," ESPN draft analyst Field Yates said on a recent teleconference. "As is the ceiling."
But is it the smart move?
The injury-plagued former All-Pro Smith hasn't played a full season since 2015, and Moses is coming off shoulder surgery. The odds that a quality third offensive tackle isn't needed at some point seem low — and the Jets could be starting over at the position next year regardless.
"I'm just so worried for the Jets [about] Tyron Smith, who has been so limited over the past four seasons, or Morgan Moses, who has been an iron man, but if you are in your mid-30s at offensive tackle there is always the risk that something could take place there," Yates said.
"It's easy for me to say, 'You need to take an offensive tackle and insulate yourself against the possibility of something happening to either of those two players.' Then again … there is probably even more pressure on the Jets than the Giants … because you did not acquire Aaron Rodgers to make a nice push toward the playoffs. You acquired him to be a playoff threat."
There is a reasonable chance that three offensive tackles with consensus high-to-mid first-round grades — Olu Fashanu, Taliese Fuaga and JC Latham — are available at No. 10. Will the Jets really pass on them for Bowers when they have Tyler Conklin (621 receiving yards last season) and 2022 third-round pick Jeremy Ruckert already in the fold at tight end?
 Penn State tackle Olu Fashanu might give the Jets offensive line depth they will need next season.
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"They may say to themselves, 'The best-case scenario for us is both of our tackles stay healthy for the season and we get great utility out of the No. 10 pick,'" Yates said. "Whereas if you take a tackle at No. 10, it's possible that player spends the entire season on the bench. I suppose that would be a bit of a good problem because [Smith and Moses] are still upright and that probably means you are having a pretty good season.
"It's an awfully fine line that the team is walking right now."
What we're reading 👀 🏀 Jalen Brunson dropped 43 points, the Knicks beat the reeling Bucks in Milwaukee and moved up to fourth in the Eastern Conference standings. Not bad for a Sunday night's work.
🏒 Maybe this is the Rangers' year. The Blueshirts rode their power-play to a win over the Canadiens at MSG, tying the franchise mark for wins in a season at 53.
🏀 Caitlin Clark may have fallen short of winning a national title with Iowa, but, as Steve Serby writes, "The impact she has made on the women's game won't soon be forgotten. She breathed oxygen into her sport that has captured the attention of television networks and viewers and corporate sponsors."
⚾ Please take a moment to remember Jerry Grote, the Mets' all-time leader in games played at catcher and a two-time All-Star, who died Sunday at the age of 81 from respiratory failure following a heart procedure.
🏀 Fans in Kentucky weren't happy with another early exit in the NCAA Tournament. Will they be happy now that coach John Calipari is finalizing a deal to become the new men's basketball coach at SEC rival Arkansas?
⚾ There have been a lot of positives in the Yankees' fast start to the season, but perhaps none have been as welcome as Anthony Volpe's evolution. As Joel Sherman writes, "no player quite as vital as Volpe. For what he means in 2024. And what he means moving forward. For what he means at the plate, but also with the potential to be the Yankees' best all-around player."
🏀 The Nets started promising rookie Noah Clowney and faced off against the Kings Sunday night. Neither development went well.
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