How do I create figure captions and references in Markdown for Mermaid generated figures?

I've been working on a Markdown document that uses Mermaid figures. As the document has grown, the importance of having captions on the figures such as "Figure 3. SRA flowchart" such that I can later write, "As shown in Fig. 3,..."

Now, if I hardcode all the figure numbers, I can come up with a solution to this. Alternatively, I know I could make this work if I have a step where I export the Mermaid figures to a PNG file. However, what I want is for Markdown to track the Mermaid figures just as if I was using PNG files, without having to export them to PNG (or other figure type).

I'm using the Markdown Preview extension (v1.22.0) in VS Code.

Is that possible?

There is no specific support for "captions" in mermaid.

An option you can try is using the title property:

---
title: Figure 1 - a node
---
flowchart LR
    id