The Wyandanch girls varsity soccer team has existed since 2021, and until last week it had never won a game. Not one, in five seasons. That ended on October 6, on the team's own field, when Wyandanch beat Copiague 3-1 behind three goals from junior Kaylee Ibarra.

One player scored every goal the program has ever needed to call itself a winner, and she did it all in the first half.

Five seasons of showing up anyway

It is hard to overstate how long this win was in coming. The program began play in 2021 and lost every game it played, season after season. Last fall the team went 0-9 and scored three goals all year while giving up more than sixty. The scores read like a dare to quit: 7-0, 8-1, 8-0, 6-0.

The team did not quit. Girls kept coming out, the school kept fielding the roster, and Wyandanch kept taking the field in Suffolk's Alternative League against programs that had been winning for decades. Players told News 12 this week that other kids made fun of them for never winning, which is the kind of detail that makes the rest of this story feel less like a sports score and more like a neighborhood holding its breath.

The rematch that turned

What makes the win sweeter is who it came against. On September 15, Wyandanch traveled to Copiague and lost 5-0. Three weeks later the same two teams met again, this time in Wyandanch.

Ibarra scored once, then again, then a third time before halftime. After the first goal she felt the win was possible, and her answer to that feeling was to tell her teammates to play as if the score were still nothing to nothing. Nobody coasted. At the other end, keeper Jayln Cruz turned away seven shots and let exactly one through. Final: Wyandanch 3, Copiague 1.

Senior Jocelyn Morocho admitted afterward that she never believed a win would come, and that she was glad to be proven wrong. For the seniors on this roster, that afternoon was the difference between graduating from a team that never won and graduating from the team that finally did.

Why this one travels beyond the scoreboard

High school scores roll past by the hundreds every week on Long Island, and almost none of them matter to anyone outside the two schools. This one does, because it is not really about soccer. It is about a program that spent five years learning how to lose without stopping, in a hamlet that rarely makes the sports pages for anything.

Girls soccer at Wyandanch Memorial is still young, and the team plays its schedule in Suffolk's Alternative League, where its opponents this fall included Copiague, Amityville, Riverhead and Central Islip. Every established program on the Island was once a team finding its footing like this one. Most of them just got their first win a lot faster.

The record now stands at 1-8, which sounds modest until you remember that the 1 did not exist in any season before this one. Three games remained on the schedule after the win, and the season wraps up on October 20 at Smithtown Christian. Whatever happens in those games, the number in the win column can never go back to zero.

A name worth remembering

Ibarra is a junior, which means Wyandanch gets her back next fall. A player who can score three goals in a half against a team that shut out her side a month earlier is not a fluke; she is a foundation. And the underclassmen who watched that celebration now know something no Wyandanch girls soccer player before them ever knew for certain: that it can be done, on their field, by them.

If you live in or around Wyandanch and hear a little more noise coming from the high school fields next season, this is where it started. The first win took five years. The second one will not take that long.