SKYFALL

Barring a very unlikely and very convoluted chain of events in later games, a win for Captain Ryan Karns' Blue in the Week Ten opener would serve to set the Fall 2026 playoff field, leaving only the potential for seed shifting on the table. In fact, even a draw with Captain Bryan Ossa's Charcoal would put Karns & Kompany in a very comfortable position, tagging even a late game coup from Grey with a steep goal differential caveat. Blue were clearly out to remove any doubt, knowing that it was 'win and in', and Josh Wirt set the tone early with his tenth of the season at 7:45 (Andrew Wong & Mark Chercoe). Owen Perks answered with a tenth of his own for Charcoal at 6:26 (Erin Plone), but Captain Karns himself pushed Blue back in front just 0:23 before the first break (Mark Chercoe). Brother Chercoe's two points in the first period drew him within two points (5) of his sister, Jenna (7), in the all important Chercoe Cup™ race, and with the latter out of the lineup, it would be Marks' big chance to surge past his sibling...just in time for (American) Thanksgiving table talk. The Blue lead grew to two in the second with Wirt's second of the game at 9:52 (Jonathan Ramirez-Legault), and Mark Nagy's third strike of the season at 7:50 in the third (Ramirez-Legault & Wirt) putting Blue in full control down the stretch. Greg Wirth ripped home his first of the season from the point just over two minutes later (Perks & Captain Ossa), but that would be all the damage that Matt Henderson (24/26) would allow, as Blue held on to beat Charcoal 4-2, officially clinching a playoff perch in the process. Nick Meglich (14/18) stood in for Chris Tran in the loss for Charcoal, dropping Ossa & Associates to 3-4-2...now (incredibly enough) BELOW Blue, whose matching record and freshly-minted head-to-head nod meant they would officially avoid a first round matchup with the unbeaten and seemingly unbeatable Neon. Alas, poor Mark would have to settle for second (in a field of two) for Chercoe Cup™ honors honours...CONGRATULATIONS, JENNA!

David and Goliath is a well-known entry in the world's most famous collection of fictional tales, but that fabled mismatch paled greatly next to the real life conflict set to unfold in the second game of the Week Ten slate. Captain Carl Vankoughnett's Neon strutted into warmups with a record of 8-0-0, a +29 goal differential, and one player with more points (39) than most have in half a dozen seasons or more. Captain Grant Goins' Maroon, by VERY stark contrast...1-5-1, -11 goal differential, and 44 TOTAL POINTS AS A TEAM...just five fewer than Thanos alone! Needless to say, Vegas spiked the spread on this match to unmatched heights (Neon -5 at game time), and it seemed the only matter left in question was just how brutal the beatdown would be. Predictably, it was Alex 'Thanos' Giummo drawing first blood at 8:31 in the first (Matt Drake & Steve Pugliese), but to Maroon's credit, that would be the only blood drawn through one period of play. The presumed plot turned and thickened considerably in the second, as rookie Ralph Barbato snapped home his second of the season at 4:40 (Captain Goins & Leah Gonzales), then his third at 1:59 (Jon Zygelman & Joe Malki) to GIVE MAROON A 2-1 LEAD! Drake would quell the uprising with his fourth of the season less than a minute later (Giummo & Pugliese), but Goins & The Gang had to feel like superheroes for lasting two rounds on even footing with the ultimate heavyweights. Folks...there was no further scoring in this game! Not only did Maroon manage to contain the forty point monster over the course of the final ten, but they would hold on to preserve perhaps the most insane 2-2 result in league history. As absolutely 'meaningless' as this tie was for both sides, it was MASSIVE for the will of the 'little people'...every non-Neon team in this league can now build upon this single brick of hope. Gabe Davenport (16/18), his Maroon mates, and SDFHL lore itself will not soon forget this result...one point for 'David', and one tiny blemish on the otherwise shimmering statue of sheer dominance that is this Neon Goliath. Meanwhile, Nick Meglich (17/19), Captain Carl, Thanos, and the rest of Neon know that the REAL season is about to begin, and they enter as the top seed with a margin of SEVEN points over second-seeded Pink. Captain Ossa's Charcoal will have the first crack at proving that Maroon's heroic effort can be replicated...and the knowledge that there are no ties in playoff hockey is all the more upset incentive.

Captain Emily Bennington's Green found themselves in an 0-3-0 hole to start their season, and even Mother Nature piled on, preventing them from improving that record over three weeks of partial or total weather washed matches. The next Green game to go the distance...another loss, dropping the Bennington's Brigade to 0-4-0 heading into Week Eight, with the only consolations being the 'games in hand' and at least three other teams floundering not far above them in the standings. Week Eight saw them dispatch one of those floundering factions (Grey), and a 1-0 stunner over Pink, followed by a 5-3 winning make-up result over Charcoal had Green not just in 'alive' mode', but full-on 'thrive' mode. Their final make-up game of the season was up next, with a triumphant but surely VERY tired Maroon dragging back onto the court to close their season. A scoreless first likely felt like a final 'victory' on the day for Captain Goins' Group (although, this period was actually played back on October 11th...ignore that with me, for the sake of the story), but Green began to chip away the chipper with two unanswered goals in the second. Wendy Enright notched her first of the season, and her first since returning from a nasty hand injury at 2:31 (Kalen Hunter), and Kalen's unassisted seventh of the season at 0:55 felt like well and truly enough to lock in a win against an emotionally and physically drained Maroon. Kalen's second of the game at 6:32 in the third (Enright), and Steve Linke's fourth of the season at 2:27 (Dan Jurgens & Kalen Hunter) were overkill insurance in what would hold as a 4-0 win for Green...their fourth straight W, making them officially the hottest team in the league! Don Tran (13/13) collected his second shutout of the season, while Gabe Davenport (16/20) was returned to earth after the brief but blissful orbit that followed Maroon's draw with Neon. Bennington & Company were not done yet...it was on to their second game of the night and fourth in two weeks, with the hope to keep the winning streak alive and push even further up the playoff pecking order...

With both teams safely part of the playoff picture, the fourth game on the Week Ten schedule held little at stake beyond playoff positioning and positive 'mojo' to close out the respective regular seasons for Captain Emily Bennington's Green and Captain Wasif Hussain's Brown. Green actually did have more to gain, with a fifth straight win meaning a leap over Brown and all the way into (at least a temporary ownership of) second place! A win for Brown would lock them in firmly as the second seed, while a loss would see them tumble...perhaps even as low as six! With all of this musing about the upshot of wins and losses, it would only be fitting for this one to end in a tie. The first period came and went that way...scorelessly so, and the second period was a stalemate as well, with each team finding twine just once. Dan Jurgens put Green in front with his third of the season at 2:31 (Weston Nawrocki & Steve Linke), and Brennan Abel leveled the ledger with his fourteenth of the season at 0:18 (Benjamin Meza). Eli Schonbrun gave Brown their first lead of the game with his fourth at 9:26 (Sadie Hellstrom & Abel), and Abel doubled the divide at 7:42 (Schonbrun & Captain Hussain). Weston Nawrocki led the comeback charge for Green with his fourth at 6:31 (Enright & Jurgens), and Kalen Hunter capped it with his ninth at 3:02 (Linke). If you're scoring at home, that's a 0-0 first, a 1-1 second, and a 2-2 third to (indeed) produce a 3-3 tie between Brown and Green. The split snapped Green's win streak, and while the lone point served no purpose to their playoff plans, a come-from-behind-non-loss is just one more building block to a team's post season psyche. The point would prove much more powerful for Brown, preventing an untimely seeding tumble, and ultimately securing the three seed for Hussain & Homies. Don Tran (28/31) was the man once again, and his top-of-the-goalie-charts season showing (.903/2.14/2 SO) is certainly one of the main reasons Green is where they are heading into playoff play, and Will Heinl (20/23) remained sharp in his own right, keeping Brown in games throughout an up and down season. As delicious SDFHL fate would have it, these two goalies will face each other again immediately in the first game of playoff action this Sunday.

Captain Shawna Hamon's White entered the final week of regular season play on the same wave of redemption that Green surfed to second season safety, coming into their reschedule showdown with Pink on a 3-0-1 run. Captain Mason Holcomb's Pink, by contrast, seemed to be stuck in something of a second half rip current at 1-2-1 over their last four. With both sides already assured playoff passage, the prize purse for winner would be a lock on the number two seed. A loss would do little to no damage to White, but would keep Pink wallowing in the lower half of the playoff bracket as a six, with only their superior goal differential keeping them from sliding all the way to the bottom seed! So, both teams safely playing out their final game, but slightly higher stakes for Pink as the ball dropped on the penultimate game of the Fall 2026 season. Kyle Snyder is a bad dude, and he was in not-so-rare bad dude form for Pink in this one. His unassisted twentieth of the season made it 1-0 Pink at 5:31 in the first, and his twenty-first at 0:32 (Justin Stege) gave Pink a two goal edge heading into the first break. Chris Fiore (a bad dude in his own right) clipped that lead to one with his fifth at 4:42 in the second (Luke Wolmer & Alex Rockoff), but it was Snyder again to complete the hat trick and restore Pink's two-goal advantage with another late period strike (0:55 from Sean Kelly). White rose to the challenge in the third, with Matt Rogers sixth at 7:40 (Fiore), and Fiore's sixth at 6:39 (Rockoff & Wolmer) drawing the teams level, but Snyder's fourth of the game at 5:16 (Craig Russell) and fifth at 2:12 (Kelly & Stege) pushed Pink back on top for good, 5-3. Captain Holcomb (16/19) backstopped his team to the win to wrap their regular season at 4-3-2...good enough (with tiebreakers over Brown and Teal) to capture the two seed. Will Heinl (16/21) absorbed the loss in John Kushneryk's stead...John wasn't absent, he was just playing out for 'his other team' in the proverbial bittersweet win-loss situation enjoy-suffered only by SDFHL double agents. If you told 2020 me that someone would score 24 goals in a season (as Snyder did), I would bet my mortgage that would be good enough for the top spot in the stats race, but...no...Thanos ended with 29 (!). Granted, Thanos played all nine games, and the one game Snyder missed was the sure-would-have-been-great-to-see meeting between Pink and Neon in Week Seven, but...we can't have nice things. Incidentally, Brown's Brennen Abel was third in goal scoring with fifteen...a huge total, but just over a mere HALF of Thanos' total...disgusting!

The results of the earlier games on the Week Ten slate had officially rendered Captain Jeremy Copp's Grey a dead team walking. While White, Green, and (to a more gradual/moderate degree) Blue had come on strong in the second half of the season, Grey free fell from the thick of contention to near dead and desperate for a win and some help coming into Week Ten on an 0-4-1 nosedive. Blue's win over Charcoal in the early game was one nail, and Green's win over Maroon the second and final in a Grey coffin fashioned by their own hands in October. That same month had been about as kind to Captain Dorothy Kline's Teal, who limped through at 0-3-1, but a stout 3-0-1 start to their season had them safe from washing out completely, and hungry to carve two more points off Grey's rotting carcass, produce some playoff momentum, and jump into the upper half of the playoff bracket. Janice Darlington was first to act, and by 'act' I mean score one of the prettiest top shelf snipes I have seen all season! She waited patiently back door, received a great pass out of the corner from Jackson Tomaszewski, and loaded/snapped an absolutely sparkler over a sprawling Jon Cima (6:18...Nick Vacchio with the second assist). Josh Tran added the proverbial gut punch late period goal at 0:10, and Teal were well on their way to the expected result. Tomaszewski padded the lead to three with his third of the season at 2:55 in the third (Vacchio), and when he added a second of the game just eight seconds later to make it 4-0, an already defeated Grey shifted all the more into 'well...let's just try to enjoy the merciful end to this torture' mode. Rob Gaudio finally answered for Grey at 0:47 in the second (Mark DeGraffenreid), but another gut punch goal, Tomaszewski's hat trick capper at 0:02 from Andy Strathman, served as perhaps the perfect microcosm for Grey's entire season. Gaudio would score again at 8:07 in the third, and the press was on to complete a hat trick in his third straight game (really the only motivation Grey had left). Alas, Gaudio's second of the game would be Grey's last of the season, as Tomaszewski's fourth (0:44 from Josh Tran) rounded out the rout, 6-2 Teal over Grey. Chuck Bender (14/16) finished the season in the middle of the goalie pack at 4-3-2, one of only three goalies to play every game for his team (Meglich and Davenport). For Jon Cima (14/20) it was a game to forget in a season to forget...a fifth straight loss to drop them off the playoff map, and nearly to the very bottom of the regular season rankings entirely. The win moves Kline & Kompany into the four spot, with this win (however easy to earn) provided a much needed push into a rematch with Captain Hamon's White as Round One kicks off this weekend.