Iowa’s Caitlin Clark is the most electrifying women’s basketball player I’ve ever seen.

She’s gotten thousands to watch her in person and millions to watch her on TV.

Include me as one of them.

She drew me in to watch her during last year’s NCAA Tournament, then did the same this year to watch on Peacock as she broke Kelsey Plum’s women’s scoring record. She got me to turn on network TV (Fox/KHON) Sunday morning to watch her surpass “Pistol” Pete Maravich’s all-time NCAA career scoring record.

I even passed up watching the NFL Combine to watch her. Unthinkable when you consider how passionate I am about the NFL Draft process. Don’t worry, I recorded the combine, all four days of it.

But what Clark has done for Iowa is much like what Colt Brennan did for University of Hawaii football. And, on a larger scale, like what Tiger Woods did for golf, or what Magic and Bird and later Michael Jordan did for the NBA. Capitalizing on her appeal, Nike immediately dropped an ad on Clark after she broke the record with two free throws in the first half.

Clark, the player, probably isn’t the GOAT of women’s basketball just yet. There’s Cheryl Miller, Maya Moore (Clark’s idol, whom she met pregame), Diana Taurasi and Candace Parker, whom you could argue was more graceful and more athletic.

Clark is just the most magnetic and possibly the most inspiring and empowering to youngsters everywhere.

As a player, she has that quick Stephen Curry-type release as well as his seemingly unlimited range. It’s a shooting stroke that hasn’t been replicated yet, except for her. Whenever she splashes a 3, fans react like it was a knockout strike in MMA.

But here’s where I push back on the all-time scoring record, which Fox lead announcer Gus Johnson mentioned after every Clark shot attempt in the first half on Sunday.

It’s not Clark’s fault that so much was made of her chase of Maravich’s record of 3,667 points. Blame us, the media, who constantly made the historical comparison.

In my eyes, however, Maravich will always be the most prolific scorer in college basketball. That’s because I’ve seen him play with my own eyes.

It was in 1969 — I was still an underclassman in high school — when Maravich scored 53 points in a Rainbow Classic semifinal game against St. John’s. I sat in the loge seating — just one of 7,433 in attendance — at the Honolulu International Center, which is now called the Neal S. Blaisdell Center arena.

I watched in awe as he drained fadeaway shots and then fell out of bounds into the team’s benches. He was a showman unlike any other at the time, a magician as a ball-handler and no-look passer. He routinely inbounded the ball with an accurate behind-the-back pass to near halfcourt.

On that December night, Maravich scored 40 after halftime, hitting 15 of 24 second-half shots, most from a distance that Honolulu Advertiser sports writer Dan McGuire described as from the 20- to 25-foot range.

In all he was 20-for-44 and told Star-Bulletin writer Tom Hopkins afterward that “I don’t think I played a real good game. … I have a cold and it bothered me. This wasn’t my game. I felt weak from the cold.”

A weak performance it was not. What’s more incredible was that it was within range of his college average.

The major reasons for my argument for Maravich — besides the game being played between different genders — were that he didn’t play in the 3-point era, or even the shot clock era. In fact, in his time, freshmen weren’t allowed to play, so he only played three seasons.

Maravich averaged 44.2 points per game in his LSU career compared Clark’s 28.3.

The 3-point arc was introduced in 1986 and its distance was amended from 19 feet, 9 inches from 1986 to 2008, to 20-9 from 2008 to 2019, to 22-1¾ after 2019 to reflect the international game.

In fact, a Baton Rouge writer once extrapolated that when factoring what would have been Maravich’s 3-point makes under the current rules, the Pistol would have averaged 54 points a game. Also, imagine if he had known there was a 3-point line, how often would he have launched shots from a distance, the gunner that he was.

Freshmen weren’t allowed to play until after the 1972 season. There were stories that Lew Alcindor’s UCLA freshman team would beat the Bruins’ varsity NCAA championship team.

What I do like about the Clark-Maravich comparisons, it re-introduced to the current masses the memory of the greatest college scorer of all time — and that was the Pistol.