The word liminal has appeared in 55 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Feb. 6 in “Endless Range, Boundless Swagger: Why Caitlin Clark Is Different” by Matt Flegenheimer:
Last spring, Clark’s rolling spectacle seemed to signal a breakthrough. The national championship game, which Iowa lost to L.S.U., attracted some 10 million viewers, a runaway record for a women’s final. This month, Clark is poised to become the leading Division I college scorer in women’s history, a chase chronicled basket by basket on ESPN with a nightly fervor once reserved for touchdown passes and steroidal home-run marks. She is also threatening the overall Division I scoring record set more than 50 years ago by Pete Maravich, the master showman to whom she is often compared.
… For Iowa, the team and the state, Clark’s maybe-final season exists in a kind of liminal space. She is still theirs; she is also everyone’s. She is plainly ready to compete professionally but might well be better served staying put. She is a 22-year-old who unwinds with video games and ESPN in the cluttered two-bedroom apartment she shares; it just happens that the ESPN sessions sometimes include her highlights (“Her Beakness,” one anchor calls her, referencing the team mascot), and the clutter comes from her corporate partners.
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