The Villages SC 2–1 SIMA Aguilas**
We finished the season with a win at the Polo Club, and we finished it three points outside the playoffs.
That is going to sting for a while, so let us be straight about why.
We lost our first three matches. All of them. That is where our season went — in May, before we had properly started.
What happened after that was the best run this club has put together. We lost one of our remaining eleven. Eight wins, one defeat, two draws. Five wins out of six in June. Undefeated through the whole of July.
Final table: fourteen played, eight won, four lost, two drawn. Twenty-six points.
SIMA finished on twenty-nine. Mississippi Brilla, twenty-nine. Lakeland, twenty-nine. Three teams, all level, all ahead of us.
And here is the part that is hard to look at.
We scored 46 goals. More than anybody else in the division — and level with the all-time PDL record for a fourteen-match season, set by the Michigan Bucks in 2015.
Our goal difference was +25. The three clubs above us finished on +20, +13 and +7.
We were the best attacking team in the Southeast and we are not in the playoffs, because of three games in May.
The players who got us back:
Willian Hopfner — ten goals and three assists, and a place on the 2017 PDL All-Southern Conference Team.
Alcides Thomas, Carlos Araujo Jr. and Matthieu Le Roux all scored six or more.
Igor Luczensky took the goalkeeper's jersey during the surge and did not concede a defeat in July.
To this group: you lost three, and then you went eight, one and two. Nobody in this division finished stronger. That is what we take into next season.
