Eleven years ago, girls high school soccer was born on South Whidbey into a harsh world.

That year, 1993, the 2A Falcons lost every game they played and ended their season 0-16. At the time, the priority for every game was to score just once and to keep the competition from putting more than 10 goals in the net.

It took until 2000 for the team to earn its first winning record. This was also the year the Falcons made their first appearance at the 2A state tournament, taking third.

On Wednesday, the Falcons made real something that was beyond a dream and even beyond fantasy for that first South Whidbey soccer squad. Playing Lakewood at Waterman Field, the Falcons closed a perfect season, drowning the Cougars 6-1 to finish regular season play at 16-0.

The perfect record — which may be the first for South Whidbey athletics since the 1968 Langley High School Football team went 9-0 — could be one for the North Cascades Conference record books. Talking about the season as his team prepared this week to start district playoffs, Falcon coach Paul Arand said his team may have posted the first-ever unbeaten season by an NCC girls soccer squad. This is a statistic he still needs to research.

Willa Purser, a senior defender who played a big part in Wednesday’s victory, said the perfect record is a testament to how far the team has come over the years. When she joined the team four years ago, communication between players was poor, she said, leading to imperfect play. That, she said, is no longer the case.

“I think that’s really a big part of it,” she said.

Now the team is tooling up for a run at the state title — something that has eluded them in two appearances in the season-ending tournament — perfection is something the Falcons want to maintain. Though there is room for one or two losses in the coming playoffs, the players want to take the most direct route to the 2A title.

“We’re going to continue to go undefeated,” said senior midfielder Anna Gilles.

This week’s game — which was pushed to Wednesday after a Tuesday windstorm made a night game against Lakewood impossible due to a lack of field lighting — was a nail biter in the early going. Having barely beaten the Cougars 3-2 on Oct. 2, the Falcons held a slim, 1-0 lead through much of the first half, courtesy a Katie Watson goal. Late in the half, senior Claudia Gil-Osorio put in what would be the winning goal, recovering her own rebound at the mouth of the net and poking it past the Cougar keeper to take the score to 2-0. The goal was the NCC leader’s 27th of the season.

Thirty seconds after that goal, Lakewood got one of its own, looping a shot over Falcon goalkeeper Allyson Riggs, robbing her of her chance to notch a 12th shutout for the season. But that was all the closer the Cougars would get.

In the second half, the Falcons poured on the offense as defenders Lena Ishii, Rita Jones and Purser kept their end clear. In the half, Watson scored a second time, freshman Kelsey Kimmel got her first goal of the game, and sophomore forward Jenna Wild hammered two more to remove any doubt. Wild is the team’s second-leading scorer with 17.

For their perfect record, the Falcons receive only a bye for Saturday’s initial round of the Northwest District 2A tournament. Their first playoff game is at Mount Vernon High School against the winner of a Lakewood-Meridian game at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.