For the first time, Cavalry FC will enter a Canadian Premier League season having won their last game the year before.

After winning the North Star Cup by defeating Forge FC in the 2024 CPL Final, the Calgary-based club now feel like the top dogs in the CPL, with an eye on adding some more silverware to the cabinet in 2025.

Certainly, few would bet against them to do so. Cavalry come into this year with the most year-over-year consistency; ten of the 11 players who started the final last November remain with the club, and all will likely be in the lineup come the season opener on April 5 in Hamilton.

One of those ten, goalkeeper Marco Carducci, has seen this club through a lot of ups and downs over his six years in the CPL, but now feels that the side that enters this new campaign is more focused than ever.

“It’s just fuelled the fire more,” the Cavalry captain said. “That feeling of finally getting over the line being champions and winning the playoffs was incredible, and it shows what we’ve built here at this club. We’re just hungry to do it again. That’s already the mindset; that high, that success of last year was fantastic, but a new season’s upon us.”

The last season was a somewhat strange one for the Cavs. It was their first ever CPL campaign where they did not touch first place at any point, and the first couple of months of the season saw them struggle to turn solid performances into wins, with eight draws in their first 11 games.

Ultimately though, the goals started to arrive and they began to put matches away, and by the end of the year there was no team with more momentum.

As a club, Cavalry had developed something of a reputation for not getting the job done on the biggest stages. They’d lost two previous CPL Finals, including the 2023 match where they’d led in extra time and went on to lose in Hamilton.

Now though, they’ve shed that reputation.

“We found a way to win games; I think for a long time, we weren’t losing, at least early on last year when we look back, but when it came to the playoffs it was always just coming up a little short in those games, which was something we look back on as a big challenge that we needed to overcome,” said Carducci.

“But we found a way last year. I think we had a resilience in our team that showed the whole way through, but it turned into a ruthlessness. We knew how to win games, we knew how to hold on, and when it came to those big games, those big moments, whatever it took from front to back, we had those big-game plays that we maybe lacked a couple times in the past.”

After winning the championship in front of a sold-out ATCO Field, Carducci can feel the passion building in his hometown for the club he’s been part of since day one. He’s noticed more Cavalry merchandise around town, from hats to jerseys to bumper stickers, and he finds himself being noticed in the city more frequently as the man who captained a local team to a title.

“As a young soccer player growing up, I didn’t have anything to look to in my own backyard,” he said. “Now you see this next generation of players, these young boys and girls that look up to professional players in their own backyard, people that grew up in the same city that they did just like myself in Calgary, that’s done wonders. We’ve been a successful franchise, but to finally get that playoff championship, it’s kind of raised things.”

Now, the challenge for Cavalry will be to push on even further in 2025. They’ve made no secret of how high their ambitions are; both Carducci and his coach Tommy Wheeldon Jr. have pointed out that no CPL club has ever done the double and won both the regular season and playoff title.

With almost the same team still in place though, the Cavs already have a couple of strong performances in their ledger for 2025; they had Liga MX side Pumas on the ropes in the Concacaf Champions Cup and won one of those two matches back in February, despite having no prior match fitness.

When they begin the CPL campaign in April, they’ll be raring to go. According to Carducci, preseason has been easier than ever this year, thanks to the familiarity most players already have with the club’s tactical identity. The biggest departures this season are centre-back Daan Klomp and midfielder Charlie Trafford, but Carducci is confident they have the pieces to make up for both.

“Turnover is just a natural part of the game,” he said. “But especially in the North American landscape, it happens a lot where five, six, seven players are typically in and out every season, in a lot of cases. For us over the last couple of season, but especially this year, keeping that core group of guys, the vast majority of players, is huge because we’d been on this wild journey together last year. That camaraderie, that chemistry can’t be replaced. I reflect on our first couple days of preseason, it felt like training camp was just a resumption of where we were at the end of last season, and that’s huge. As with any team, any organization, whether it’s sport or otherwise, there’s this onboarding process where you’ve got to get everyone up to speed, and we really didn’t have to do that this year.”

Now, Cavalry will be intent on starting this year stronger than ever. They have yet to win a CPL season opener against Forge, and they’d love for this contest to be the first.

The champions tag is something the Cavs have grown to embrace over the winter, and it’s not one they’ll be shedding lightly.