A light blue poster with the words “We’re Here for You” between a drawing of two Dolphins hung on the wall of the Fairfax High gym Wednesday afternoon. Another sign read: “Let’s go Pali!”

Fairfax teams are nicknamed the Lions, but on this day home fans were rooting almost as hard for the visitors.

Despite playing on the opponents’ floor, something it will have to get used to for the time being, the Palisades High girls basketball team saw its first action since a fire ripped through the Pacific Palisades community eight days earlier.

The Dolphins won big, 75-42, but their real victory was suiting up.

Ayla Teegardin, a junior wing on the varsity team, lost her home in the fire but was anxious to get back on the court as soon as possible. She won the opening tip, scored five points, grabbed five rebounds, dished out four assists and had two steals while Riley Oku led the way with 17 points for Palisades (7-6, 2-0 in Western League).

“The first day we had a gym to practice in I was there,” said Teegardin, who is staying with her family at a hotel in Marina del Rey. “Basketball helps me get through the hard things in my life. It’s a way I can cope.”

Head coach Adam Levine shared that in addition to Teegardin, three frosh/soph players and three JV players also lost their homes.

“Every parent said this is the best news of the week,” said Levine, who has been flooded with calls and texts from coaches offering donations, equipment and gym time. “We were off Monday, so yesterday was the first day back and Brentwood School let us use their gym for practice. The girls couldn’t wait to play.”

Athletic director Rocky Montz was at Wednesday’s game and credited Principal Dr. Pam Magee for “putting the press on” to get winter sports teams playing as soon as possible.

The boys basketball squad resumes its schedule Thursday at LACES (preceded by the girls), plays Hamilton at Pierce College on Friday night and plays Oxnard at El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills on Saturday. Jeff Bryant’s team (9-5) has practiced the last three days at Westside Neighborhood School in Los Angeles.

Though the Palisades campus is off limits, the baseball and football fields are in good shape and neither the gym nor the pool appear to have suffered significant damage.

“As of right now we’ll be doing online learning for at least the next few weeks,” Montz said. “I’m not allowed on campus, but from pictures I’ve seen on-campus facilities look pretty good. We were dealt a bad hand but we’ll handle it the best we can. For league games, we’ll play some doubleheaders [boys and girls] and others will be separate depending on what alternative sites we can find. Soccer starts back up next week and if we have to play games on the road we will. As far as water polo, we’re looking at Loyola Marymount, Samo High and SMC or possibly the YMCA pool near University High. As for the spring season, which begins in three weeks, Cheviot Hills Pony Baseball and Venice Little League have offered help so we’re considering all possible options.”

Even the wrestling team has found a place to practice, a Brazilian jiu jitsu studio in West L.A. Indeed, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

“Safety is the most important thing, but we need a home to come back to,” Montz added. “There are issues we need to be taken care of and just how much time that takes I don’t know yet.”

An air of desperation hung over a handful of Premier League clubs last summer. Accounting years were drawing to a close across the top division of English football and the pressure was on to book profits before it was too late. Player sales were a must if a profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) breach was to be avoided before June 30.

Newcastle United’s business back then was a microcosm of the chaos. They reluctantly agreed to sell Yankuba Minteh, their then teenage winger, to Brighton & Hove Albion for £30million before sanctioning the exit of Elliot Anderson, the homegrown forward, to Nottingham Forest for £35m.

“We had no other option,” their head coach Eddie Howe told reporters in October about those two departures. “We couldn’t breach PSR, couldn’t face a points deduction, and the only two deals we had on the table at that time were the two deals we did.”

Newcastle, who had spent £320million in the first two and a half years under their Saudi Arabian owners, did not want to sell either Minteh or Anderson. Nor, you suspect, did they want to pay Forest £20m for Odysseas Vlachodimos, a third-choice goalkeeper yet to feature for them in the Premier League under Howe. Anderson’s sale, though, was reliant on Forest, who had breached PSR last season and were close to the line again, getting something in return, so Newcastle had nowhere to turn.

Others were at it, too, with Aston Villa, Everton, Chelsea and Leicester City all concocting their own mutually beneficial deals to chase compliance. Close to £200million, most of it “pure profit”, was collectively banked by those six clubs in June’s final weeks and Tuesday brought confirmation that the trading had been worth it.

A 14-day assessment period of 2023-24 accounts and PSR calculations had not raised red flags within the Premier League and, unlike last January, when Everton and Forest were both charged, there was no cause for disciplinary action to be triggered.

Leicester’s case remains more complex than others, with the Premier League still believing they are on the hook for at least one charge amid the legal challenges back and forth, but 2024, the year of the asterisk, has left its mark.

The three PSR charges heard last season — two for Everton and one for Forest — resulted in a combined 12 points being deducted, the kind of shock therapy that was difficult to ignore.

It may never be known just how close Newcastle and others came to going beyond their spending threshold last season. Clubs’ 2023-24 accounts, which are due to be filed by the end of March, will give us clues, but the absence of transparency in the PSR process makes it difficult to offer fully informed analysis.

Clubs instead have to be judged by their actions and those madcap days of late June revealed anxieties ultimately born out of the penalties handed to Everton and Forest a few months earlier. That jolted the whole of the Premier League, heightening motivation to find quick profits in the transfer market once the season had concluded.

Howe admitted as much — Newcastle had no wish to sell Minteh or Anderson. Certainly not both. But, as Howe, the front-facing figure in that organisation, accepts, there was “no other option” but to accept £65million in transfer fees for the duo if a PSR breach was to be avoided.

Were Chelsea as close to the edge? That is unclear but their compliance owed as much to the sale of two hotels which are part of the wider site at their Stamford Bridge stadium to other companies owned by BlueCo, Chelsea’s parent company, as it did the late sale of defender Ian Maatsen to Villa for £37.5million. Others did not have the luxury of property deals enhancing the numbers.

Maatsen’s transfer to Villa helped Chelsea comply with PSR, but not as much as the sale of two hotels (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)

PSR continues to have its vocal opponents, such as Villa co-owner Nassef Sawiris, who told the Financial Times in June that the regulations were inhibitive and “not good for football”, but last season served the warning that overspending would still carry a sporting cost. Everton and Forest became the bad boys nobody wanted to emulate.

That was obvious with the sudden business done in June, and the wariness has been extended into this season.

Manchester United, traditionally one of English football’s strongest financial forces, have made it clear they have little scope to strengthen new head coach Ruben Amorim’s hand after their heavy losses of recent times. Newcastle also remain bound by financial constraints, with only about £60million spent this season. Villa’s net spend for the season, meanwhile, stood at about £26million going into the current winter transfer window.

Those three clubs could have spent more but learnt last season that punishments would then be unavoidable down the road.

It would not be fitting to congratulate the Premier League on strong governance when 115 charges of financial wrongdoing still hang over four-in-a-row title winners Manchester City and Leicester’s case remains unresolved, but last season served notice that rules had to be adhered to. Points deductions would be in the post to any club not complying.

“The Premier League submits that the only proper sanction is a sporting sanction in the form of a deduction of points,” it argued in Everton’s first PSR hearing, which brought an initial 10-point penalty, later cut to six on appeal. That exact sentence was repeated when Forest faced an independent commission.

PSR has its inconsistencies and imperfections, and might well lead to more scrambled, incoherent transfer business before financial years are out at the end of every June.

But the past 12 months — and no fresh charges this week — have made it clear to clubs that it is a sanction to be taken seriously.

(Top photos: Getty Images)

Former Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Muffet McGraw has revealed the details of Caitlin Clark’s decommitment from her program during the star’s recruiting process in 2019. 

McGraw appeared on the “Good Game With Sarah Spain” podcast on Tuesday, and said that if Clark followed through on her commitment to Notre Dame, then McGraw might still be the coach there. McGraw retired from coaching in April 2020, just months ahead of Clark’s freshman year. 

“I may still be coaching if Caitlin Clark came to Notre Dame,” McGraw said.

McGraw says she received a verbal commitment from Clark to play at Notre Dame, but it never felt certain. 

“She committed to us, but I had a feeling it was kind of a soft commitment when she did, because she couldn’t decide, couldn’t decide,” McGraw said. “And then finally she said, ‘I want to come.’ But it wasn’t like ‘I’m coming!’ It was kind of like ‘I made the decision.’”

Then, after a tense and dramatic wait, McGraw found out she would miss out on Clark, who announced her commitment to Iowa on Nov. 12, 2019. 

“After that, we waited and waited for her to announce it, because as you know, we’re not allowed to announce anything. The players have to do that themselves,” McGraw said. “So she made the announcement a long time after that, I kept saying ‘When is it coming out?’ And then when she made the announcement, she was going to Iowa. But of course she called me to tell me.” 

McGraw’s retirement came shortly after the end of the 2019-20 season, five months after finding out she wouldn’t be coaching Clark, ending a 33-year run that included two national championships in 2001 and 2018. 

McGraw went on to call Clark’s decommitment from her program in favor of Iowa, “probably a pretty good decision.” 

Clark previously told ESPN that her own family wanted her to play for the Fighting Irish. 

“My family wanted me to go to Notre Dame,” Caitlin said. “At the end of the day they were like, you make the decision for yourself. But it’s Notre Dame! ‘Rudy’ was one of my favorite movies. How could you not pick Notre Dame?”

USC’S JUJU WATKINS OPENS UP ON CAITLIN CLARK’S WHITE PRIVILEGE COMMENTS AND EMBRACING CONTROVERSIAL NEW FANS

Iowa guard Caitlin Clark cheers during Big Ten Women’s Basketball Championship against Nebraska at the  at Target Center on March 10, 2024 in Minneapolis. (Angelina Katsanis/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Clark then spoke about her experience visiting Notre Dame and her consideration of playing for the Fighting Irish during an interview on the “New Heights” podcast on Jan. 2. She said she ultimately made the decision not to play there because of a feeling in her gut. 

“I could feel it in my gut, I was like ‘Ahh, I’m not supposed to go there,’” Clark said. 

“I basically narrowed it down pretty early on when I was going through my college recruitment that I wanted to be like in the Midwest, just kind of a homebody. Family person. Just wanted to stay fairly close to home. So that narrowed a lot of stuff down.”

Clark then played her entire four-year college career for the Hawkeyes, where she broke multiple program and NCAA records, including the all-time leading scoring record among all college basketball players, men or women, in history. 

Clark also met her current boyfriend, Connor McCaffery, while at Iowa. McCaffery played on Iowa’s men’s basketball team for his father, head coach Fran McCaffery. 

Caitlin Clark dribbles down the court at the All Iowa Attack Basketball Fieldhouse on April 22, 2017, in Ames, Iowa. (Luke Lu/Diamond Images via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, without Clark, Notre Dame fared OK, but not nearly as well as Iowa. Under the leadership of current head coach Niele Ivey, the Fighting Irish made the NCAA tournament three years in a row from 2021-24, but they lost in the regional semifinal all three times, while Clark led much deeper tournament runs in 2023 and 2024. 

Clark led Iowa to two straight national championship game appearances, en route to becoming the No. 1 overall selection by the Indiana Fever in the 2024 WNBA Draft. McCaffery was already in Indiana working on the Pacers’ coaching staff, and they are still in the city together as he now works on Butler’s men’s basketball coaching staff. 

Clark was named WNBA Rookie of the Year, was selected to the All-Star team, led the WNBA in assists, and helped lead the Fever to the playoffs in her rookie season. 

Clark was also named Time magazine’s Athlete of the Year for 2024. 

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.