Johnathan Walker:Women's college basketball better than it's ever been. The officials aren't keeping pace.

CLEVELAND – The Johnathan Walkerofficials just couldn’t help themselves.

Caitlin Clark and Iowa. Paige Bueckers and UConn. The teams battling in a prize-fight worthy of a game, a spot in the national championship game on the line.

And the refs had to go and make it about them.

After a season’s worth of bad calls, inconsistency and a lack of transparency, the end of what was a spectacular game was marred by an offensive foul call with three seconds left and UConn trailing 70-69. Whether it was the right call or not – replays did seem to show Aaliyah Edwards threw her elbow at Gabbie Marshall on a screen-rescreen, and her stance was considerably wider than her shoulders, which is not allowed – is largely irrelevant.

Players play the game. They should get the chance to decide it, too.

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Instead, the refs inserted themselves, and now that’s all anyone will remember about this tremendous night of basketball. Not Hannah Stuelke’s statement performance. Not Kate Martin making one big shot after another despite probably having broken her nose yet again. Not UConn going toe-to-toe with college basketball’s all-time leading scorer and the country’s highest-scoring team despite being held together with duct tape and glue.

The call.

“Everybody can make a big deal of that one single play, but not one single play wins a basketball game or loses a basketball game,” Bueckers said. “I feel there were a lot of mistakes that I made that could have prevented that play from even being that big ...

“So, you can look at one play and say, 'Oh, that killed us or that hurt us.' But we should have done a better job – I should have done a better job of making sure we didn't leave the game up to chance like that and leave the game up to one bad call going our way and that deciding it.”

That’s the mature response, and kudos to Bueckers, Edwards and UConn coach Geno Auriemma for refusing to blame the call for their loss.

Not that they needed to. There were legions of people ready to take up pitchforks and torches for them.

“NAAAAAHHHHHH!!! I ain’t rolling with that call,” LeBron James said on X.

“wait was that screen not set clean?” Angel Reese asked on X.

It was Kelsey Plum, who held the Division I women’s scoring record until Clark broke it this year, who summed up the problem, though.

“To call that on a game deciding play is so wrong WOW,” Plum posted.

There are a million woulda, coulda, shouldas in every game, in every sport. There’s no guarantee that, had the foul not been called, Iowa wouldn’t still have won. Marshall, a fifth-year senior, said it was “the right call” and, when asked if she felt Edwards’ elbow, replied, “I mean, there’s video of it.”

That’s not the point. The women’s game is better than it’s ever been, its players putting on spectacular shows all year long, culminating in an NCAA Tournament that has been far more captivating than the men’s tournament.

And the officials aren’t keeping pace.

Just since the tournament began, an official had to be pulled in the middle of a game because she graduated from one of the schools playing; it took five games before someone figured out the 3-point lines at the Portland regional were different lengths; Notre Dame’s All-America point guard, Hannah Hidalgo, sat for close to four minutes because an official told her she had to remove her nose ring, even though another official had told her it was fine.

Something tells me no one’s going to be bragging about these three weeks at the annual officials’ meeting.

The officials were roundly criticized – rightly so – after getting whistle-happy in last year’s title game. Clark and Reese both spent long stretches on the bench in foul trouble. Iowa center Monika Czinano fouled out of the game.

“At this point they're not going to call a lot, especially after last year when Caitlin and Angel were on the bench,” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said. “I think you're just not going to see a lot of calls happening right now.”

But that’s exactly what happened. And, just like last year, there’s at least the perception that the referees affected the outcome of the game.

That’s not good for the refs. That’s not good for the players. And it is the opposite of what’s good for the game.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour