Asked earlier this week about her next game, Caitlin Clark politely reframed the terms of the question.

“It’s not Caitlin Clark versus Paige Bueckers,” the freshman guard said. “It’s Iowa versus UConn.”

She’s correct: The bracket does, in fact, read No. 5 seed Iowa versus No. 1 seed UConn. It’s not “Big Ten Freshman of the Year and national scoring leader Caitlin Clark versus Big East Freshman of the Year and national win shares leader Paige Bueckers.” But you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The hype for Saturday’s game is at a rare level for the Sweet 16, and all of it is focused on Clark and Bueckers, the two most dynamic freshmen in the game.

For much of the year, the national discourse has coalesced around Bueckers, and justifiably so. She entered this year as one of the most hyped recruits in years. She came on campus with talk of restoring a dynasty at UConn—four years without a title might not sound like much, but in Storrs, that’s a veritable drought—and with more than half a million followers on Instagram. (She also graced a flip-cover of as the Gatorade high school female athlete of the year back in August.)

The expectations were high, but she met them every step of the way, putting together a stellar regular season filled with highlights and accolades—First-Team All-America, a finalist for Naismith College Player of the Year, all of it. ESPN compiled a package on Bueckers that ran frequently during the first round of the tournament (even during halftime of Clark’s first-round game with Iowa). If you hadn’t watched much of the women’s game, Bueckers might have seemed to you like not just the best freshman in the country, but the freshman in the country.

Which would be a monumental disservice to Clark. She entered college with a résumé comparable to Bueckers’s—the two won gold medals as teammates at the 2019 FIBA U19 World Cup and 2017 FIBA Americas U16 Championships—and put up a roughly equal freshman season. She led the nation in scoring with 26.8 ppg. She was third in assists with 7.1 apg. Yet she ended up Second-Team All-America to Bueckers’s First-Team, and a bit of narrative seemed to develop, particularly in a national media environment that still tends to focus on just one women's basketball storyline at a time, that there was Bueckers, and there was Clark.

But that’s wrong, and so far in March, there’s been plenty from Clark to disprove that idea. In No. 5 seed Iowa’s second-round win over No. 4 Kentucky—a tough matchup that was by no means supposed to be a smooth win—Clark outscored the Wildcatsin the first half. (She eased up in the second half and still finished with 35 points, seven assists and seven rebounds.) In Iowa’s first-round win over Central Michigan, WNBA legend Sue Bird came onto the ESPN broadcast to call Clark “the most exciting player in college basketball right now,” and the freshman made the compliment look completely deserved.

To get a matchup of Bueckers and Clark in the Sweet 16, then, is to be almost spoiled by such a tantalizing contest so early in the tournament. It’s not just a matchup of two players at the top of the game, but of two players who stand to be in that position for a long, long time—for the next few years in college and, ideally, far beyond that as pros. UConn, unsurprisingly, is favored on Saturday. Bueckers has a stronger supporting cast than Clark—though don’t sleep on her teammate Monika Czinano—and UConn is a much better defensive team than Iowa. But when it looks like we might be asking “Bueckers or Clark?” for years to come, be glad that, at least for one day, we can watch Bueckers Clark.