Thank you!

Edit: What the fuck is wrong with this woman?

In November, she told reporters after a road game that they could blame her if they were sick at Thanksgiving.

“I ain’t a sissy,” she said, holding a tissue and choking back sniffles. “I’ve got some kind of cold. It might be covid, but I ain’t testing.”

TICKFAW, La. — In the two sisters’ minds, the old house remains as it was: a one-story brick ranch a hundred yards off the road, white fence under two ancient oaks, tin roof long before it all caved in.

Their father built on the farmland he had inherited. Dug a swimming pool, poured the concrete for a basketball court, carved two softball fields into pasture. His two girls, born less than a year apart, would grow up running and hiding and disappearing among the pines.

“I just miss the memories,” Tammy, the 60-year-old younger sister, says.

They’re in the backyard in her favorite, shooting baskets with Daddy by starlight. It feels so real, she says. So precious and warm.

“I wish I could have it all back,” she says.

FIFTY MILES SOUTH AND WEST, a massive crowd is here to watch the older sister, to wear sequins like her, to cheer on her team. Five decades have passed since Kim Mulkey’s father first bounced a basketball to his daughters, explaining the keys to victory.

The game itself hasn’t changed much, but everything else around Mulkey has. It’s a Sunday in early March, the same day Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old career scoring record will fall. More than 13,000 people are packed into the LSU arena named for Maravich, and Tigers alumnus and former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal is in the tunnel. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a picture of star LSU forward Angel Reese on the front and her nickname, “Bayou Barbie,” in hot pink letters on the back.

Reese strolls onto the floor. Fans chant “One more year!” pleading with her to stay in college. And because the value of her name, image and likeness (NIL) rights is estimated to be worth multiples more than the $240,000 WNBA maximum salary, she just might.

“Times are different,” Mulkey will say in a news conference following the game. “You can be beautiful. You can be talented. You can be tough. You can be you.”

Few live that last part more than Mulkey, who wears feathers almost as dramatically as she ruffles them. Her outfits during games are legendary, and during last year’s NCAA tournament, fans wanted to see Reese and her teammates tear through the bracket, sure. But they also wanted to see what their coach might wear, say or do next.

She explodes at officials and is suspicious of reporters. Mulkey declined repeated interview requests for this story, and after LSU received an email from The Washington Post seeking comment on various elements of this story, she used two NCAA tournament news conferences to take aim at The Post’s reporting, threatening legal action in the event of “a false story.” LSU declined to comment.

“Not many people are in a position to hold these kinds of journalists accountable,” she said. “But I am, and I’ll do it.”

It’s by no means her first or most high-profile controversy. In 2013, the NCAA suspended Mulkey for a tournament game after she criticized referees. She later publicly defended Baylor, her former employer, amid a sexual assault scandal in its football program. In November, she told reporters after a road game that they could blame her if they were sick at Thanksgiving.

“I ain’t a sissy,” she said, holding a tissue and choking back sniffles. “I’ve got some kind of cold. It might be covid, but I ain’t testing.”

She is also known to hold grudges and clash with players, including about their appearances and displays of their sexuality, according to interviews with former players and news reports. Mulkey and Brittney Griner, the coach’s biggest star at Baylor, have feuded for more than a decade. And while Griner’s 294-day detainment in a Russian prison eventually required White House intervention, it wasn’t enough to ease tension long after Griner first said Mulkey encouraged gay players to hide their sexuality and “keep your business behind closed doors,” Griner wrote in her memoir.

“Kim Mulkey is an amazing coach; the reason I went to Baylor is because of her,” says Kelli Griffin, who played for Mulkey from 2007 to 2010. But, Griffin says, “She made my life hell” by drawing attention to Griffin’s clothes and issuing a suspension that ultimately ended the player’s career. And she believes it started after Mulkey found out she was gay.

Mulkey’s attorneys, in letters to The Post, denied that Mulkey treated gay players “more harshly or differently.” They provided an affidavit from former Baylor player Morghan Medlock, who said that she was in a relationship with Griffin and that she never witnessed Mulkey mistreat Griffin or other gay athletes. Former Baylor and LSU player Alexis Morris put it more bluntly to ESPN: “Coach Mulkey is not homophobic.”

Mulkey, in a 2013 interview with OutSports, insisted that she didn’t care about players’ sexuality and wouldn’t ask them about it.

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” she said then. “Whoever you are. I don’t care to know that.”

Her conflicts with star players are over other issues too, though, and they have continued at LSU, even as players’ leverage and celebrity swell. She benched Reese for four games this season for reasons the coach refused to explain, weeks after appearing to call out Reese for a poor shooting performance. (Reese did not respond to messages from The Post seeking comment.) Mulkey told a supporter last year that Reese had been left off an awards list because of her GPA, according to email obtained via public records request by The Post. In another email, Mulkey complained that Reese was one of several players who “stay on that social media crap.”

Mulkey is many things, among them a 5-foot-4 hoops whisperer, an exceptional teacher, a coach willing to dive deeply into players’ emotions to push them past their preconceived limits. She is also one of college basketball’s most colorful personalities, viewed by some as an almost cartoonishly ornery supervillain. Regardless, as the women’s game finally takes center stage, she is an essential part of the show. In last year’s national championship game, she wore a sequined, technicolor ensemble and unfurled the best game plan of her life.

LSU forced Iowa star Caitlin Clark to battle for every shot, every touch, every step. The Tigers shut off access to the lane, allowing Clark to be predictably lethal from long range but otherwise one-dimensional, enough for LSU’s blowout win and one achievement that eluded even Shaq and “Pistol Pete”: a national title.

It was Mulkey’s seventh as a player or coach, and even in victory she was sarcastic and prickly.

“Coaches are hollering, ‘Get off the court,’ ” Mulkey snapped after winning the 2023 tournament, her fourth title as a head coach. “And I said: ‘Don’t tell me what to do; I’m fixing to win another championship.’ ”

Coaches don’t win 723 games, reach five Final Fours and hang around this long by being cuddly. Mulkey isn’t your grandmother or your mascot, and while everyone else is fighting for women’s basketball, she’s fighting against something because it’s the fight that drives her. Even if you played for her, won for her, loved her.

“I’ll just say she doesn’t care about winning the popularity contest among coaches,” longtime Texas A&M coach Gary Blair says. “She wouldn’t want to.”

So, yes, all of this — the sold-out arenas, television ratings, attention — is well and good. A fire is finally rising in the women’s game.

Because Mulkey is the fire, and she has been burning for 40 years, too busy laying waste to everything and everyone in her path to be impressed by Clark, Shaq or anyone else trying to soak in this storybook moment.

BACK WHEN THE FOOTAGE was grainy, if it existed at all, she was poetry in pigtails: whirling passes behind her back, between her legs, past opponents. Sonja Hogg knew Louisiana Tech would be getting speed and grit when she recruited Mulkey, but was it too much to hope for more?

“I thought maybe she’d grow a little bit,” Hogg says now.

No such luck, but in the early 1980s, women’s basketball teams took what they could get. There was no money for private jets or elaborate team dinners, so the Lady Techsters dined on fast food on bus rides to Texas and Oklahoma. And not even the nice bus. That one was reserved for the men’s team, leaving only the “Blue Goose,” such a rattletrap that the travel itinerary built in extra time for breakdowns.

Home games were social affairs, and everyone wanted to see the newest member of Hogg’s quintet. A point guard raining down 30 shots per game, as Clark sometimes does, would have been unseemly anywhere in 1982. But at Louisiana Tech, coaches just wouldn’t have allowed it. Mulkey’s job was to run the offense, distribute the ball, do things precisely Hogg’s way.

Hogg (rhymes with “rogue”) was the visionary, the strategist, the program’s good cop. Assistant coach Leon Barmore was the hard-ass. Fit in, do right or go see the enforcer for a profanity-laced rant or a date with the arena stairs.

“Back in the day,” former Louisiana Tech player Mickie DeMoss says, “they didn’t have to explain why. You get there, or you’re going to run.”

Louisianans drove hours to watch the Lady Techsters, so named because the men’s mascot was the Bulldogs and, as Hogg once pointed out, “a lady dog is a bitch.” Hogg required her players to be ladylike, and little girls wore their hair braided like Mulkey’s as they squeezed into Memorial Gym. The arena could fit 5,200, but Hogg says if she greased the Ruston fire marshal with tickets, he would allow in a thousand more.

Because Hogg put on a show. Tennessee’s Pat Summitt wore pantsuits. Ohio State’s Tara VanDerveer donned sweaters. Cheyney’s C. Vivian Stringer occasionally wore a skirt. Hogg drove a white Cadillac, wore beaver skin or mink, styled her platinum hair into a towering meringue.

“I couldn’t be dragging around in some sweatsuit,” she says now. “I mean, I wore warmups during practice and tennis shoes and whatever, but gah-lee, you don’t do that on the sideline.”

Louisiana Tech smoked Tennessee in the 1982 Final Four, stirring whispers that Summitt was a fine coach b