The professional league's inaugural draft happened three weeks after Cole's, in a considerably smaller venue than Madison Square Garden — a modest arena in St. Paul, cameras from two regional networks instead of a national broadcast, folding chairs instead of luxury boxes. It felt, in its own way, more significant than the spectacle Cole had walked through, precisely because of its smallness: sixty women who'd spent their entire careers being told a moment like this might never exist, now watching it happen in real time, imperfect and modest and entirely, historically real.
Reese sat in the second row with Cole beside her, both their fathers behind them, watching names get called for a league that hadn't existed in any concrete form eighteen months earlier. The Minnesota franchise held th
