INDIANAPOLIS — This is a column about basketball. Just the way Sophie Cunningham would have wanted.

On Thursday night, the Indiana Fever and Las Vegas Aces played a highly entertaining basketball game. Though other things happened around the basketball part.

Recently, Cunningham’s team has found itself squirming beneath an unrelenting spotlight because of something Cunningham said about trans women in sports. In an interview with ESPN, Cunningham offered: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” Following those comments, her teammates and head coach have been dragged into the depths of this culture sewage. That means basketball hasn’t been the focus, much to Cunningham’s chagrin.

“The WNBA media, all we ever do is cover everything except basketball,” Cunningham said Wednesday morning. “It’s like, ‘What are we doing?’”

There’s no way Cunningham could’ve predicted that her fiery comments about something unrelated to basketball would spark a media inferno. This is a woman singularly focused on basketball — except, maybe, when she hosts a semi-regular podcast with a reality TV star. (One recent episode teased how co-host West Wilson would break his silence on why he stepped away from “Summer House.” Quite a contrast from The Athletic’s No Offseason podcast, which just talks about basketball and stuff.)

So, allow this story to attempt a rare thing with the Indiana Fever of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and mention the word “basketball” as much as possible.

As we were saying: On Thursday night, the Fever and Aces played a highly entertaining basketball game. Well, until the third quarter, when a long delay interrupted the action while Aces all-star Jackie Young pointed out a courtside fan and security escorted two men out. The pair did not return to their seats. The team said they did not violate the Fan Code of Conduct, though Young said one of the men “made (a comment) that was a little bit too far.”

Oops. Sorry for that. Let’s redirect to basketball, where Aces guard Chelsea Gray became the first player in WNBA history to hit two rare buzzer-beaters in the same game — a 3 to tie the game at the end of regulation, and another 3 to win the game in overtime. How’s this for basketball analysis: Gray had as many buzzer-beating 3-pointers as Cunningham had points in the game.

The Aces’ 86-84 overtime victory was appealing for anyone who craves late-game chaos. And about what happened earlier … regret to mention that a demonstrator of one spent an hour or so before the game outside Gainbridge Fieldhouse, speaking into a megaphone about chromosomes.

Since Cunningham’s comments, there have been small groups of protestors demonstrating everywhere her team has resumed its basketball activities because of a topic that has little to do with basketball. In Seattle, in Portland and in Minneapolis, the groups have assembled in support of Cunningham. At times, they’ve met peaceful resistance. However, in downtown Indianapolis, one man paced alone with a sign that on one side read, in part: “No Child is Trans.”

A grandfather, holding a young girl’s hand, flipped the bird behind his back toward the demonstrator, and an Angel Reese fan from Dayton, Ohio, in town to celebrate her 70th birthday, stopped to talk with the man about his sign, she said she agreed but their conversation dovetailed into race. Mostly, the protest was ignored. Fans walked past him, delightfully unbothered so that they could take a photo beneath Caitlin Clark’s banner hanging outside the basketball arena.

Oh right, that reminds me again of basketball, and Clark, the Fever’s most popular basketball player.

On Thursday, Clark missed her first shot, a deep 3; this season, she ranks fifth in the league in 3-point attempts. This is considered a basketball stat. She did eventually score, however, and on her first bucket she moved around her former teammate, Aces center Brianna Turner. This is the same player who recently had made ripples for non-basketball reasons when she accused the Fever of allegedly silencing players after the team had fired a male staffer over sexual harassment claims. The Fever denied Turner’s allegations two weeks later.

But back to basketball, where on Thursday, Clark and teammate Aliyah Boston were named to the USA Basketball roster for September’s FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup in Berlin. Also this week, Clark’s other All-Star teammate, Kelsey Mitchell, earned Eastern Conference Player of the Month honors for July. Fever fans can’t get enough of their basketball stars, and during the game against the Aces, one woman held up a small sign: “CC + Kelsey MVP.” In Indiana, Clark is viewed as a Most Valuable Player.

However, in MAGA spaces, she’s called a “coward.”

It feels non-basketbally to bring up that Clark has refused to wade into the conversation that Cunningham sparked about trans women in sports. Initially, after the controversy began, Clark did not speak with reporters. When her absence from the frontlines of this cultural war was noted, and when pro-Cunningham demonstrations continued to overshadow the basketball, Clark finally said: “It’s for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball.”

Clark has since been torn down by members of the very community that had held her up as its representative. Cunningham, meanwhile, got a shout-out from Indiana’s Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, who once defended the purpose behind the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a human.

Beckwith said he was “proud” that Cunningham was a Hoosier, and his praise had little to do with her basketball skill set. People like him are not actually listening to Cunningham when she says let’s focus on sports, they’re using her. And they don’t actually care about basketball. Just listen to them.

“This is week three … covering the WNBA, and I have to say, I’m done. I hate the WNBA,” said Fox News host Jesse Watters. “I mean, I don’t mind women’s basketball. My girls play basketball, but I don’t want to cover women’s basketball. I don’t want to be a WNBA analyst. We get paid to have an opinion about everything. And this is something I don’t care about.”

In other news of conservative men supporting women, Outkick founder Clay Travis, who has called Cunningham “a rock star,” spent the week baiting the Aces, the defending WNBA champs, to a $10 million payday if they defeated a boys’ state championship team. Cunningham, for some reason, reserved her criticism for the WNBA media.

This is the problem that hounds the Fever. No matter how much the media, the fans and especially the players want to focus on basketball, the sideshow overshadows everything on the court. The protestors and politicians keep showing up. The blue check marks in Elon’s rage arena keep posting about this sport with impure intentions. It’s so exhausting.

For her part, Cunningham is trying to have it both ways. She throws gasoline on the complex discussion of trans women in sport, and fans those flames by spending time before the Aug. 2 game in Minneapolis, smiling and posing for photos with women wearing XX XY T-shirts. Then she complains when WNBA media notice what she stands for.

Cunningham wants all the good that comes with her proximity to a superstar like Clark, and the newfound fame she has built with her own outspokenness, but she wants none of the consequences. It would be nice for her if the world worked like that, just like it would be nice if the rest of us could stick to basketball.