Thrilling Regular Season Finale

I'm still trying to wind down some from the exciting regular season finale we played in this afternoon. We went in knowing a win or a tie would keep us as the #5 seed in the upcoming state tournament. So, we went in to win that game, with one of our starters injured, so we hoped to get some quality minutes out of some 7th graders. Well, it was quite windy, and both coach and I didn't like that too much. We wanted to just have a nice day, but no, that wasn't to be. So, we went into the game against the wind in the first half, and survived some big scares with close shots, and defensive saves. Fortunately, we came out to the halftime break at 0-0. We had chances, and more chances, but the wind just didn't want us to do anything to perfectly, so we knew it might be tough, but we were ok, because the tie would keep us where we were. We had a couple people struggle, and with a few minutes left, coach looked at me and said, "Do we need to make one more change?" I gave my input and said I thought we should, and we did. Just seconds after the substitute entered the game, with 5 minutes left, we broke though with a great chip over the goal keeper and into the goal for the 1-0 lead. The kid that scored had moved to a different position because of the sub we'd decided to make, which made us look incredibly smart. That would hold up as the stout defense again posted the shutout, and we head into the state tournament with a 9 win, 4 loss mark. The four losses we have are to the four seeds above us. That's a comforting stat, knowing we can play with the teams above us, and that we beat all the teams below us in the standings. Plus, I'd told coach at the beginning of the year that I would be extremely happy if we would post 5 shutouts this year. I personally thought that would be tough for us to do, but that we'd have a slight shot at it. We ended the season today with this being our 6th shutout, 2 of them on the road, and 4 coming at home. Just some season ending stats:

- Stout Defense - One of our main goals this year was to defend our home field. We were 5-1 at home, only giving up 4 goals, and all those in the first weekend of the season. We have not allowed a goal in Huron since August 23.
- Scoring - Our goal differential was +9. We scored 30 goals, allowing 21.
- Challenges from top - Of the 21 goals we allowed, to the top 4 teams in the league, we gave up 18 of the 21 goals.
- Road Woes - When we played on the road, and travelled for more than 1 hour 15 minutes, we were 0-3 allowing 15 goals, while only scoring 2.
- Scoring First - We are 9-0 when scoring the first goal of the game.

Just some interesting things that I came up with looking back at the season. Hopefully, we can change a couple of things to get set up for making a run at some upsets at the state tournament. We do feel that we have the people to play with any team in our division in the tournament, as long as we can score first....