CORNER BROOK Twenty wins, no ties, zero losses.
With a 3-0 victory over the Steers Insurance Curling Rangers on Wednesday night, the Health and Performance Physio Hawks officially soared to heights not seen previously in the Corner Brook Molson Senior Men's Soccer League.
No club has ever had a 20-0-0 season and, although the league has no actual archive from which to draw information, no one asked seemed to recall a regular season in recent memory where a team managed to win every single game they played.
Coincidentally, the last team to go undefeated was the Rangers, with an 11-0-3 mark in 2006.
Clarence Bennett struck twice in the momentous victory for the Hawks, while Steve Hobbs added a late marker.
Hobbs and Adam Tilley shared the clean sheet in goal.
The regular season success continues the apparent changing of the guard in terms of who holds the power in the men's senior soccer league. The Hawks ended the Rangers string of eight consecutive league championships last summer and now look poised to pounce on a repeat title of their own.
"Before, when we'd come to the field, the Rangers would have had 25 bodies here as we were showing up to the pitch," said Hawks' Bennett. "Today we had 25 bodies here as they were showing up to the pitch.
"The Rangers were the team to beat in past seasons and we'd sort of know that in the back of our minds," he added. "But they knew full well tonight they had to come here and beat us. We're the team to beat now. That's it."
Hawks' Todd Warren joked the team never seriously discussed running the table until they were at 19-0-0.
"You're never too confident," he said. "Realistically though, I think when we were at around 16 wins we were thinking we could do something special. Everyone on this team should be so proud of each other because we worked hard for it."
Warren and Bennett both agreed team unity off the field has turned the group into the Curt Hennig-like machine on the field.
"We play for each other every game," Warren said. "We're a family."
"Everybody is hanging around together, doing stuff off the field together," Bennett added. "We're a group of friends and a team and that's really helping us this year."
The Rangers wrapped up the regular campaign in second place with an 8-6-6 record and had nothing on the line in the contest, but would have clearly loved to punch that win total up to nine.
"Obviously we wanted to ruin their party here today, but they're a strong team and they had a great season, you can't take that way from them," said Rangers' Cory Mosher. "They beat every team in the league five times. They're the best team in the league at this point.
"The new season starts Monday and the Rangers will be ready to play," he added. "We're hoping to get to the final and give them their first loss of the year then."
That's a fact not lost on the Hawks — nobody wants to be the 2007 New England Patriots.
"It's tale of two seasons for us," Warren said. "We had a goal to finish this up 20-0 and that's what we did, but from here on in it's just one game at a time and we won't think about what happened here once the playoffs start."
Bennett said without a trophy, a flawless regular season doesn't mean a thing.
"If we lose in the playoffs this will all be for naught," he said. "Nobody will remember the 20-0 regular season."
The following is a summary of the other league game on Wednesday night:
CB Dominion Under-18s 3,
West Side Monarchs 0
Lyle Griffin (2) and Doug Warren supplied the offence as the Under-18s blanked the Monarchs.
Nonetheless, the Monarchs still finish in third place, leaving the Under-18s to open the post-season Monday against the Sorrento Tactics FC in the fourth versus fifth game, in which the winner advances forward and the loser goes home.
