Please.

“I don’t even know if I can say this, but: that call sucked, SVP.”

Andraya Carter spoke for all of us Friday night in breaking down the decisive moving screen foul that ended UConn’s NCAA Tournament run. After an incredible game in which both of Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers were pushed to their respective limits, the referees had the last say in what was what.

In one of the most anticipated basketball games in recent memory, the Iowa Hawkeyes defeated the UConn Huskies 71-69 on Friday night. Perhaps the most talked-about basketball player in America this side of LeBron James (“How are the Lakers doing?,” ad nauseum), Clark led the Hawkeyes in defeating the Huskies, on a bad shooting night, to the tune of 21 points, nine rebounds and seven assists.

But the call at the end will resonate. After an improbable sequence in which UConn drew within one, Aaliyah Edwards, a certified star and the complementary big that Bueckers needed anyway, committed an offensive foul by setting a moving screen on Gabbie Marshall, sending Clark to the free throw line and allowing the Hawkeyes to go up by two.

Plenty of talk has been heaped upon the women’s collegiate game this year, mostly of the “if the men experience a hyper-specific and cruel scrutiny, why can’t the women?” variety. A lot of people had money on this, now that that’s so accessible. While more eyes on the game naturally means more criticism, it’s not like we, the basketball-viewing public, are pining for more prime James Harden-era Houston Rockets-type hero ball.

Letting them play, then, remains an aspirational place. Interfering with a generational game down the stretch is reductive, at best, and given the way the game had been officiated to that point, it ends up taking away so much from the game as it had been.

Preachy and indignant though it may be, this was a game that needed to end in the hands of its players. Yes, Geno Auriemma and company will tell us all that they never should’ve been in that position in the first place because good teams don’t need the refs to step in on their behalf. Sometimes, though, they might need refs to step out.

(Go Gamecocks.)