Probably the most extraordinary moment in the Indiana Fever’s remarkable season occurred when it was over. Friday, coach Christie Sides walked into the Gainbridge Fieldhouse interview room and took a stronger stand on racism and hatred than many politicians running for office this November.

Sides read into a microphone from a prepared statement as if she was delivering testimony to Congress.

In excoriating social media lepers who derided her players — and other WNBA players — at times this season, Sides made a bold and firm statement for womankind.

The saddest element in this basketball environment was that she thought it necessary to speak out and that no one believed it was inappropriate or out of place for her to focus partly on this subject in reviewing the Fever’s 2024 campaign.

For all of the grand successes associated with the Fever’s season, from the record-breaking attendance and television viewership, from the draft selection and popularization of Caitlin Clark, from the improvement to 20 wins and a playoff spot, there was an ugly undercurrent, only rarely bursting to the surface, as the Fever and the WNBA progressed from May to September.

At times, Sides and players were subjected to hate comments and racist comments, to aspersions cast on gay, lesbian and trans-gender identification.

“There’s absolutely no place for hate or racism of any kind in our game,” Sides said. “Zero.” She decried “trolls” on social media who hide behind fake names.

Disturbing, but what Sides said was absolute truth. When will America grow up? The greatest Democracy in the history of the world has about 345 million people and they are all unique, all different, and it is astounding in 2024 that the nation still cannot come to trips with diversity. The nation persecuted Native Americans beginning in the 1600s, bound Blacks into slavery until midway through the 1800s, discriminated against women in numerous ways for centuries, and these days it has become trendy to despise trans-gender people. Some carry their bigotry over into the sports realm.

Some fans have blind spots about their team. With the Fever, early on, when the team began slowly, Sides was brutally mocked on social media and fans wanted her fired for no good reason.

Just about any time Clark took a hard hit in a physical game, Fever fans took it personally, wanted her protected, and instantly suggested the fouls were racially motivated.

The Fever experienced amazing support, filling Gainbridge to 17,274 capacity nearly every home game and drawing record-breaking crowds on the road. It was like Amazon Sale Day every day given the way fans purchased team merchandise souvenirs. In-house, fans of all ages rooted madly for the players. That was outwardly all healthy support.

Who was out there denigrating the gains because of a player’s color or sexual orientation? What type of nasty person spews garbage about athletes just playing their game? General manager Lin Dunn said the social media commentators who posted sinister statements are “not real Fever fans.”

Clark, the transcendent star who set NCAA records and dramatically translated her game into the pros, becoming rookie of the year during Indiana’s 20-20 season, echoed both of her bosses, Sides and Dunn.

“It’s definitely upsetting,” Clark said. “Those aren’t fans. Those are trolls.”

When teams develop good chemistry, they usually play better together and win more. Sometimes they circle the wagons, which center Aliyah Boston, the 2023 rookie-of-the-year, suggested the Fever did to block out the noise.

Stifling the noise is commonplace urging from coaches these days, especially those that are losing. They don’t need shoot-from-the-hip critics to reverberate in players’ minds. For better or worse, criticism of on-court performance has always been part of the fan mindset. But personal insults cannot be justified.

The evolution of social media technology helps magnify the negative, with no fear of reprisal, and is a more recent development than mere booing from the stands.

“There has been so much hate spread,” Boston lamented. “They just said everything under the earth. We built a strong sisterhood.”

More than we knew, perhaps those pre-game Fever player on-court huddles — with arms around each other’s shoulders — were meant to be less pep-talk encouragement than stone walls.