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When Caitlin Clark moves — weaving through defensive traffic; waving unsubtly for a teammate’s pass; wriggling free enough to catch, fire, catch fire — people tend to follow.

This instinct informs every opponent’s scouting report, to the extent that anybody can prepare one with confidence: a triple-underlined directive to shadow Clark, the biggest star in college basketball, lest she splash another 3-pointer from the Hawkeye beak in the University of Iowa logo near midcourt.

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At perpetual sellouts, at home and on the road, crowds approaching 15,000 crane their phones in her general direction from pregame stretches through postgame autograph sessions. Young girls and old men tug at “22” Clark jerseys that flap above their knees. Small delegations from her Manhattan marketing firm file in to appraise their new asset. Stewards of the sport, wary from experience, permit themselves to wonder if something might be different this time.

“I’ve stayed away from basketball,” said C. Vivian Stringer, the Hall of Fame former coach at Rutgers and Iowa who retired in 2022. “But how can you stay away from Caitlin Clark?”

The question carries far-reaching implications — social, financial, semi-existential — for Clark’s sport, her state and the long and sometimes halting march of women’s athletics in America.

Last spring, Clark’s rolling spectacle seemed to signal a breakthrough. The national championship game, which Iowa lost to L.S.U., attracted some 10 million viewers, a runaway record for a women’s final. This month, Clark is poised to become the leading Division I college scorer in women’s history, a chase chronicled basket by basket on ESPN with a nightly fervor once reserved for touchdown passes and steroidal home-run marks. She is also threatening the overall Division I scoring record set more than 50 years ago by Pete Maravich, the master showman to whom she is often compared.

“I saw somebody called me, like, Ponytail Pete,” Clark said before last year’s title game. She did not dispute the compliment.

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Fans regularly ask Clark to sign their shirts and shoes — and, coaches say, the occasional body part.Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Whenever this season ends, Clark — who grew up in West Des Moines, two hours from campus — will face a fateful decision: return to Iowa or go pro, where attention and TV viewership lag behind the college game?

And basketball fans will face their own, consciously or not: Will they care as much when Clark is somewhere else? When she moves, will they follow?

“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Lisa Bluder, Iowa’s coach, nodding at a long history of peaks and plateaus in women’s basketball. “I wish I could positively say yes.”

Many data points are encouraging for Clark personally, at least, and for the long-term health of the college game. A new television deal values the women’s tournament at about $65 million annually, according to the N.C.A.A., a roughly tenfold increase from the last contract. Clark’s rise, coinciding with the name-image-and-likeness era in college sports, has already positioned her to cash in with major endorsements.

In October, the team played before a record 55,646 people in an exhibition game inside Iowa’s football stadium, a number that quickly found its way onto T-shirts. Clark’s trading card has fetched precedent-busting five-figure bids at auction. In Iowa City, proprietors say, business at local restaurants can more than double on game nights, offset only slightly by an uptick in replacement costs for glasses lost to excessive celebration.

“People are jumping out of their chairs, drinks are flying,” said Matt Swift, who co-owns a dozen restaurants in the area. “It’s gone from something you maybe put on the television at the restaurants to mandatory TV.”

Often, it is the less quantifiable metrics that resonate most. At road games especially, where guests are less accustomed to Clark’s rhythms, venues swell with a kind of frantic murmur whenever the ball swings her way, as if she might shoot it before it arrives. At home, amid a ferocious blizzard recently, thousands of fans drove past overturned semis in very-sub-zero Iowa temperatures to reach Carver-Hawkeye Arena in time to see her. Many ordered ice cream once inside.