Thank you for cheering with me and thirsting with me and I hope to see you back here for more next season.

Instead of a standard matchup preview, because that’s not really my thing, I thought we’d recap some of the out players on each team and what to watch for from each of them.

Also, did you see that Crystal Dangerfield’s girlfriend changed her Twitter handle to “Crystal’s ROY Trophy / Her #1 Fan” and I just CANNOT WITH THE CUTENESS.

If you think all the buzzer-beating action happened in the NBA this week, it’s probably because you didn’t have access to WNBA games.

Also: Brittney Sykes and Seimone Augustus making the case that they belong on Pose.

The Mystics guard chose to sit out the 2020 season in order to be in the fight for racial justice and because, as she told The Athletic, “I can’t compartmentalize having the luxury of dribbling a basketball while people who look like me are being shot and killed every single day, many by the hands of police.”

This is a column dedicated to all gay WNBA content all the time — and yes, that includes queer thirst. And boy, is there a lot of thirst to be had when it comes to W players. But apparently, not everyone got the memo.

When the WNBA asks the public to “say her name,” they mean Black trans women, too.

Luckily for us, the result of the Wubble is a seemingly endless stream of TikToks and Instagram Stories that give us a peek into the lives of the players.

This column aims to show you what you’ve been missing by not watching these women and, if you have, I hope you’ll find the queer lens on the league you’ve been looking for here. We’ll cover real stuff, like the fact that the WNBA is the only professional league to ensure their social justice work is trans inclusive, alongside lighter stuff, like thirst traps and queer Daddy content.

But the story of this match-up between the Storm and the Mystics started eight years ago.