The photograph dwells in the memory of a time we’d like to forget. During the pandemic-addled summer of 2020, women locked arms and stood in matching black shirts, all bearing the same demand in white letters: “Arrest The Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.” It was the most powerful demonstration of a brief period of widespread activism throughout sports, these WNBA players taking command with more audacity and clarity than anyone else.The commissioner didn’t inspire them to gather. They didn’t ask the league to authorize their dissent. The players convened themselves, inside a bubble in Bradenton, Fla. — cut off from their families and their cities but not their empathy — and decided what the moment required of them.Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon and self-described “entrepreneur of social change,” died last week at 92. She spent a lifetime mapping the destination that the WNBA reached six years ago. “Power can be taken, but not given,” Steinem once said. “The process of the taking is empowerment itself.”During the bubble season, the players took their final steps into that power. They had long known who they were and what they stood for. That summer, they made it impossible for the rest of the country to keep pretending not to notice.Before a playoff game in 2020, Alysha Clark, right, and Jewell Loyd of the Seattle Storm wear T-shirts protesting the killing of Breonna Taylor. (Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)Cathy Engelbert, who became the first WNBA commissioner in 2019, inherited the league as this enlightenment took hold. She walked into a locker room that had already self-actualized, that no longer needed a leader to build its identity. It needed one with the presence to match it. Seven years later, as she prepares to leave the job in a few months, her record reveals a commissioner who made a lasting impact by building the business around those women and a reticent spokeswoman often absent when the business needed her to stand beside them.Despite all the drama and grievances about her management style, Engelbert did not fail the players. She never caught up to them, however. That is the unfortunate part of a tenure full of expansion, media-rights billions and two transformational collective bargaining agreements. And that reality is something her successor must reckon with as soon as the hire is made. The new commissioner’s priority will be to command the business and earn the respect of a labor force that now fully understands its power and expects a leader who can meet it where it has risen.A league is not merely its balance sheet. That is especially true for this one. Consider what the WNBA has accomplished in 30 seasons: a sustained, growing enterprise with nine-figure franchise valuations in a country with a long and ugly history of disparaging women’s sports. The existence of the WNBA, or NWSL, or any other such pro league, is not neutral. Never has been. Never will be. The bubble amplified that thought. For one season, before recovery and routine returned, the players stripped away all pretense and showed their hearts and willpower. They did it as a plea to society. But as is often the case when a larger movement collides with sports, the athlete participation in a larger movement inspires those same players to push for change within their own walls.