They have been here before, and it didn’t end well.

The last time Cavalry travelled to Tim Hortons Field for a Canadian Premier League playoff game, it was the first leg of the 2019 Final. After Joel Waterman was sent off in the 37th minute, the Cavs would go on to lose 1-0, a deficit they were not able to overcome in the second leg as Forge lifted the inaugural North Star Shield.

To this point, that has been the story of Cavalry FC. No team has won more matches in Canadian Premier League history than the Calgary side, but four seasons in they are still yet to win a playoff match.

They return to Hamilton this Sunday for the second leg of the 2022 semifinals. With no away goals rule in effect in this year’s playoffs, the 1-1 draw in the first leg at ATCO Field is essentially null and void. It is now down to 90 minutes, plus potential penalties, for Cavalry to write a new story at Tim Hortons Field, and book at spot in the 2022 Final.

“We know, we know we have been here before, we know we’ve always been in the chase and close but not quite gotten there just yet,” Cavalry keeper Marco Carducci told media before the match. “That adds a little bit of something, but I think we are approaching it the way we approach every year; we want to be in the hunt, and here we are, it’s one game to get to a final and that is the way we are approaching it.”

Part of doing that successfully will be learning the lessons of the past but also not allowing the pressure or doubt of other fixtures to creep into their psyche. Cavalry have won just twice in seven all-time trips to Hamilton and were winless at Tim Hortons Field this season, for example, but that stat doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on what will play out on Sunday.

“I think I’ve used the quote ‘No man steps in the same river twice,'” said Cavalry coach Tommy Wheeldon Jr. “This isn’t the past, this isn’t the future, this is the present, and we’ve just got to stay in it. We have got one game, and we are one game away from a final. We don’t take too much of what’s happened before because it is a different group of players. We know, we play to our strengths, and we nullify theirs, and we are on our way to the final. We’ve just got to stay focused on that and not worry too much about the noise around it.”

Despite the loss back in 2019, Carducci was brilliant in that match including making a penalty stop on Tristan Borges. There is a picture of that save in the Cavalry dressing room, that the keeper says he looks at regularly.

“We know that it is going to come down to 90 minutes plus and whatever transpires in the match when we are there now, the past is sort of irrelevant,” Carducci. “We’re preparing as best as we can for this game on Sunday, and that is where our focus has stayed.”

A big focus of the club this season has been on controlling the facets of the game that they can influence and not allowing external factors to dictate a result. Wheeldon Jr. said that during the playoffs even the most detailed plans can shift in a moment, so it is about adapting to whatever Sunday’s match throws at them.

“In these playoff fixtures that we talk about there have been sending offs, there have been penalty decisions, there have been goals not given or a decision there, ‘was the ball in or out’,” said the Cavalry coach. “You can’t account for that, you’ve just got to play to the whistle.”

That mantra, “Play to the whistle,” has been adopted by the club ever since last year’s playoff loss against Pacific FC, during which the match-winning goal was scored in a controversial fashion after several Cavalry players stopped playing, waiting for the referee’s whistle. If they can do that, they feel they have a very good chance of reaching a second Canadian Premier League final.

“We know we can beat them, we have beaten them, we have had success against them before and at the end of the day it is playoff football, it about getting a result and getting the job done and it might be pretty, it might not be pretty, but the reality is we need to go there and get a result,” said Carducci.

That result would go a long way towards changing the story of Cavalry FC, and would earn them another 90 minutes of soccer, one where the ever-elusive North Star Shield could await at the final whistle.