Todd Dunivant and Michael Stephens win 2017 NASL title with San Francisco Deltas

The Deltas have had a whale of a season.

The newly created NASL team had high hopes when the club launched in the spring. But those hopes were quickly dashed as harrowing realities set in: San Francisco is a hopelessly expensive city to operate a minor-league team, the startup-branded management was clueless, and the team wasn’t drawing enough fans to survive. When CEO Brian Andrés Helmick took the unusual step of publicly informing the supporters the team was in danger, many rightly feared the project was done for.

The team could have folded in the towel, but that’s not what happened. Led by renowned manager Marc dos Santos, the squad pulled together as a team and stormed to a second place league finish, even finding the time to do things like organize training sessions at San Quentin Prison along the way. Two former Galaxy servants played a vital role: Left back Todd Dunivant served as Dos Santos’ head assistant while Michael Stephens pulled the midfield strings.

It all came to a richly satisfying conclusion last night as the San Francisco Deltas defeated the New York Cosmos 2-0 to win the 2017 Soccer Bowl in front of a packed crowd at Kezar Stadium. Can you say...pitch invasion?

The odds are all but guaranteed the Deltas won’t be around next year, and the NASL itself might not exist for much longer, but for one night, soccer trumped all.

Good luck to Todd and Mikey. We could use Dunivant around the StubHub Center these days.