SAN FRANCISCO — The Golden State Valkyries made history Thursday night as they became the first WNBA expansion franchise to make the playoffs in its inaugural season.

The Valkyries clinched the berth after beating the Dallas Wings 84-80 at Chase Center.

“A lot of people didn’t believe in us, (and) it lights a fire in us,” forward Janelle Salaun said. “It’s a good thing. It’s better to start as the underdog and prove it to everyone. I know the girls on this team have (always) been in this position. It’s something that we are used to, and we did it as a group.”

Veronica Burton squared up against 2025 No. 1 draft pick Paige Bueckers as the game clock ticked down to under 30 seconds left in the game and Golden State up by just two points.

Burton started working toward her right, dragging Bueckers inside the 3-point line with her. Burton tried to shake her, and as Grace Berger reached as the help defender, Burton fought through the contact and threw up a circus shot.

“I kind of blacked out,” Burton said, laughing.

As the ball went in, she punched the air, and Ballhalla erupted as the Valkyries went up four, all but deciding the game.

“I don’t even know what I was feeling. … I was just trying to get a bucket when it mattered in crunch time,” Burton said. “I wasn’t looking for the foul, I was just looking to finish. … It was a huge help having everyone instill a bunch of confidence in me.”

Burton finished with 15 points on 5-of-10 shooting and five assists. Salaun led the team with 19 points, and Carla Leite had 15 points on 6-of-8 shooting and a plus-28 net rating.

After the final buzzer, the players gathered at center court and put on T-shirts that read “Playoffs 2025.” Fans refused to leave the stands, dancing to Rihanna’s “This Is What You Came For.” Salaun grabbed the arena mic and yelled, “Let’s Goooo,” and inside the locker room, players doused each other with water.

Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase watched the celebration from what she considered a healthy distance, knowing she would let the team have this moment, but tomorrow it would be right back to the film room.

Golden State has just three games remaining on its regular-season schedule — two against the league-leading Minnesota Lynx — and each is crucial to secure seeding and not fall to the seventh or eighth spot in the standings.

“I know, I’m a party pooper,” Nakase said.

She added: “We’re not done yet. Maybe after the season, after this is all done, I’ll reflect … I’ve got to stay present. I’ve got to stay where my feet are … and I think that’s why we’ve been able to do what we do, because we stay present. I don’t really allow them to celebrate. They can obviously enjoy this, but I also keep them humble. Y’all want to continue to make strides? Then let’s stay focused.”

Despite being a “start-up” team, the Valkyries have been confident in themselves since they reported to camp in April. With a roster made up of former sixth women and role players, international stars and young rookies, the common conclusion was that it would take time — at least a season — for Golden State to find its footing. That’s how most other expansion teams start out, like when the Atlanta Dream joined the WNBA in 2008 as the league’s last expansion team.

But the Valkyries made it clear they were writing their own story and did not want to be compared to expansion teams before them. They used the doubt as fuel.

“I told the girls this: We picked you guys for this reason — to do things for the first (time),” Nakase said.

Golden State has broken several records throughout its first season. First, it became the first team in women’s sports history to eclipse 15,000 season-ticket deposits. It led the league in attendance, selling out all 22 of its home games in Chase Center, which seats over 18,000. Now, it’s the first expansion team competing in the playoffs.

“This is awesome, honestly,” Burton said. “It’s a testament to all of the work that we put in, a testament to the belief that our coaching staff had in us; Ohemaa [Nyanin], the front office, all of them. To do it with the group that we did, we’re just enjoying it, soaking it in. Obviously, there is a long road ahead of us, but (we’re) able to sit and enjoy it.”

Because of a scheduling conflict, the Valkyries will not play their first home playoff game at Chase Center. Instead, Game 2 will be hosted at the SAP Center in San Jose, 48.4 miles from San Francisco.

“We can’t control it,” Burton said. “We have faith in our fans that they are going to continue to show out for us. Wherever we play, we’re going to bring our basketball. We’re confident, we’re excited for the opportunity to compete. Regardless of where we’re at, we’re going to show up.”

Who the Valkyries will face in the first round is still up in the air. They currently sit in the sixth seed, one game behind the New York Liberty. The Seattle Storm are a game and a half behind the Valkyries in seventh. The Dream, Phoenix Mercury and Las Vegas Aces are in a heated race from the second, third and fourth seeds.

Ferrari has explained why it decided against using Lewis Hamilton to try to tow team-mate Charles Leclerc to pole position at Formula 1’s Italian Grand Prix.

Hamilton’s five-place grid penalty for this weekend’s race at Monza meant he would never be in contention to start at the front – so opened up an opportunity for him to be used to give Leclerc a beneficial slipstream.

The idea seemed even more of a logical option for Ferrari with the field being so competitive in Italy and a tiny advantage from a tow potentially having a big impact in the fight for the top spot.

Hamilton himself had even suggested in the build up to the weekend that he would be open to the idea if it meant helping Leclerc to the front.

“It’s not been discussed,” he said. “But if it meant getting Charles there, then I would be happy to play that role.”

But despite the opportunity that was clearly on the table as Leclerc matched eventual pole position man Max Verstappen in the first Q3 runs, Ferrari elected not to impose it for the second efforts – with Leclerc holding track position in front of Hamilton throughout.

While Leclerc was happy with the lap he delivered, he admitted not getting the perfect tow from those ahead of him perhaps compromised him as he ended up 0.215 seconds behind Verstappen at the end.

“I’m happy in a way that I think we’ve maximised the package that we had today, and I think I did a really good first lap in Q3,” he said.

“Unfortunately on the second lap of Q3 I was a little bit in the front with nobody – or just Yuki [Tsunoda] – in front. That makes a big difference here, so there wasn’t much more that we could have done.

“But I think we did a good job maximising the result. I think the gaps show that McLaren and Red Bull are a bit too far ahead.”

Asked if the slipstream should have been discussed, Leclerc said: “It’s something we’ll discuss with the team now.

“It’s always tricky to get it perfectly right and Lewis is still fighting to be starting as far up as possible. So we’ll discuss about it, but I don’t think it’s the main point of today.”

Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur was pretty clear after the session that while there were theoretical gains to be had from the slipstream, there were too many downsides to doing it.

With the way that cars have to run at a minimum speed throughout the lap, it would mean needing to totally sacrifice the car in front from being able to do a competitive lap.

Speaking to F1 TV after qualifying about why Ferrari did not go for the tow tactics, Vasseur said: “Because with this story of maximum lap time, if you do it, you have to sacrifice one car, and it’s important for the team and for the two drivers to be in a positive mood.

“For sure, it could work, but also could not work at all, even for Charles, because you are much more focused then on the tow, the gap with the car in front of you, than on the tyre preparation. And the tyre preparation is so important today that we decided to be focused on your own pace.”

Vasseur added that his conclusion was Ferrari had done the right thing in focusing more on the tyre work – but did concede that things could have been different had Hamilton been totally out of the picture in terms of a grid position.

“We decided to do it this way, without sacrificing anyone,” he added. “Seeing Leclerc’s gap, I don’t think he would have taken pole anyway. Charles understood and didn’t ask for it. It would have been different if Lewis had started from the pitlane.”

Hamilton, who qualified fifth but starts 10th because of his grid penalty, said that the slipstream had never been considered because of the risks involved of getting it wrong.

“It’s not something that’s been in any of my other teams,” he said. “Ultimately, you potentially end up sacrificing one of the drivers. And I’ve already got a five-place penalty, so points wise I needed to be as high as I could.”

Bitter feeling

Leclerc said that being happy with a lap that ended up only being good enough for fourth on the grid was not something to be overjoyed about.

Asked if there was a bittersweet feeling, he said: “It’s also bitter when you are fighting for fourth and third place. So maybe.

“In the end it’s kind of what we expected. But we shouldn’t be satisfied, we should be pushing as much as we can to try to turn that situation around. It’s what we are doing.

“At the end of the day, I did the lap that I wanted, I put everything together, I’m very happy with my lap actually and I don’t think there was much more possible. So on that side I’m positive. But obviously starting fourth isn’t great.”

The first actor to ever win two consecutive Oscars didn’t exactly break the mould to do so.

Spencer Tracy snagged his first trophy for the 1937 sleeper hit Captains Courageous — a Rudyard Kipling adaptation starring Tracy as a questionably accented Portuguese fisherman, forced to care for and educate a belligerent youngster — a youngster who, it turns out, wants and needs nothing more desperately than a velvet-glove father-figure to thrive under.

Then the next year he followed it up with Boys Town — a movie based on a true story about a Catholic priest so self-sacrificing, he founded an entire boarding school (still in operation today) for misbegotten street kids with nowhere else to go.

It was a tale apparently so affecting that in his acceptance speech, Tracy himself claimed the Oscar shouldn’t go to him but to the real-life Father Flanagan — to whom he ended up giving the statue anyway.

So when asking why a movie like Steve exists, or why we might be drawn to watching it, there’s a long track record to pull from. Though unlike Boys Town, the new Cillian Murphy flick — having just had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival before an Oct. 3 release on Netflix — isn’t drawn directly from real life.

WATCH | Steve trailer:

Instead, it’s a “reinterpretation” of Max Porter’s novella/prose poem Shy, the evocative, esoteric and at-times just odd book about a teenager at a school for troubled youth.

Dealing with themes of depression and abuse in a layered and experimental text (a documentary being made about the school and Shy’s own violent thoughts and dreams are alternatively represented through contrasting fonts and full-page spreads), Shy already seems like a novel resistant to adaptation. Coupled with the additional changes made by Belgian director Tim Mielants (Small Things Like These, which also starred Murphy) and Porter (onboard as screenwriter), the challenges only seem to mount.

Steve — as its title might suggest — tells the same borstal boy story but from a different angle. Instead of following the eponymous enraged teen stuck at the floridly named Stanton Wood, we now follow its endlessly self-flagellating head.

Here, that’s Cillian Murphy as Steve — a sad-eyed, heart-of-gold headmaster/mentor type simultaneously trying to keep a British publicly funded school for youthful offenders open while frantically trying to avoid a fist in the teeth from any one of them.

That’s made all the more difficult as the aforementioned documentary crew quizzes the kids on their deepest traumas. Their repeated prompt of “Describe yourself in three words” garners responses various enough to forecast the film’s erratic mood — from Riley’s “Cornish legend, hardcore and cheeky” to Shy’s “depressed, angry and bored” to Steve’s simple “very, very tired.”

But as Steve bats away the cameras poking their way through the boys’ dresser drawers, things proceed to fully go off the rails when he gets the news he’s been dreading: Due to ballooning costs and a sinking reputation, Stanton Wood is set to close in six months.

What that means for its pupils — especially Shy, careening headlong into a violent pit of despair and loneliness from which he may never escape — is unfortunately not hard to guess.

In terms of execution, Steve is in league with a veritable ocean of “Angry Boys In Fictional Last Chance Institution” type films, and it makes sense why.

From America’s Bless the Beasts and Children or Short Term 12, U.K.’s Made in Britain or Scum and Canada’s 10-1/2 or Dog Pound, to modern classics like The Holdovers or even Holes, there’s something perpetually irresistible to writers and audiences about this type of character and situation — watching strong-willed (if poorly mannered) youths railing pointlessly against the crushing horror of being alive, instead of submitting to routine and comforting numbness like the rest of us. 

Authentic, impressionistic

In that regard, Steve is firing on all cylinders. The cast of disaffected kids who director Mielants came up with put The Breakfast Club to shame, while newcomer Jay Lycurgo’s turn as Shy is heartbreaking in its authenticity. Murphy is no one to shake a stick at either, with his steadfast dedication to the school — paired with an unsteady foundation for his own mental health — grounding the film around them.

But like the novella, Steve is an inherently impressionistic movie. Pseudo-archival documentary footage and talking head interviews are interspersed with shaky cam realism and even a music video-like drone sequence. Perspectives shift wildly from character to character as well, painting a picture more of the school as a place than any one person’s story — or even attempting to tell a traditional story at all.

Even more than its source material, Steve‘s storytelling style is reminiscent of something novelistic; more than a straight plot, it builds the feeling of being a lost boy as confused and scared of your reactions as those you react to. Just like Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies painted the picture of a boarding school tragedy through the interconnecting lives of its many attendees, Steve maps how the many tendrils of trauma can form long and confused branches from long-forgotten moments. 

But where that book built its schema over roughly 700 pages, Steve pinballs from terrifying backstory to high school banter to shattered glass and heartache in the space of 90 minutes.

The effect is at times beautiful, though at limited other points lacklustre: The late reveals of Steve’s pathos feel oddly tacked on given how many other narrative balls the film needs to juggle. And the emotionally brutal conclusion to Shy’s arc hits far harder when his story is given our full attention. Simply unpacking it takes up nearly half of the novella; in the film, it’s almost just a slightly maudlin, overwrought afterthought.

But that doesn’t detract from what we came here for, from what makes us return to these stories again and again: the endlessly interesting set-up of young men horrified by the endlessly bleak outlook of real life battering them down, and the well-intentioned but impossible task of explaining how the world ain’t really that bad.

It is probably so interesting because it makes an infinite amount of sense to us: the immeasurable pain and inherent unfairness of it all is not all an illusion. Even though the way to survive is to ignore that, maybe there’s a bit of vicarious thrill in seeing the punk-rock male loneliness personification bust up some windows — or call members of Parliament eminently British cusses right to their faces.

And it is certainly cathartic to watch someone selflessly take on the task of trying to convince them it’s all going to be OK. While it’s a trope so easily and often exploited its likely most widely known as a subject of derision on South Park, it’s still worth returning to when done well. Steve may not be perfect, but none of us are. If we were, we wouldn’t need the movie.