How would you imagine the greatest individual season in NWSL history? Our hypothetical player would need to score a lot of goals, obviously. Breaking Sam Kerr's single-season scoring record (18) would certainly get plenty of attention, so let's put that at the top of the list. How about assists? Assists are important, too. Let's say this player has ... five of those. Five sounds good.
Let's go back to the goals for a second. We know that all goals aren't created equal, and that poachers and penalty specialists can often sneak their way to the top of the leaderboard. That just won't do—we're talking about the best season in history, here—so let's make sure our player didn't score any of her goals from the spot, and is out-performing her expected goals tally by two. We need more, though. Let's get crazy and say that this player is an NWSL rookie, and arrived from Chinese Women's Super League at age 25 to blitz the NWSL with the league's first 20-goal season. We'll need a fun, quirky statistic, too, so let's say this player became the first in league history to score a goal against every team. And we need moments. Like, what if the record-breaking goal happened to be a 25-yard strike that makes a convincing case for being the hardest a soccer ball has ever been struck by a woman in a professional match? What if that goal looked something like this:
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