Chapel Hill High’s latest soccer title brings back great memories.

Congratulations to the Chapel Hill girls’ soccer team that won its second state championship in four years with a 1-0 triumph over Cox Mill Saturday in Raleigh.

More amazing than the Tigers’ 19-1-1 record this spring was that they allowed only two goals through their 21 games.  All that was needed for this championship was Maddie Reiter’s header off Isabel Leinenweber’s perfect corner kick. The Chapel Hill girls also won the state 3-A title in 2014.

But, last fall, the Tiger boys won state by shutting out Asheville’s A.C. Reynolds 2-0 on goals by Ryan Smith and Ryan Meachem. It completed a 23-4-1 season for Chapel Hill, which had lost in the 2016 state championship game. The boys’ title broke a 34-year drought for a school that won three state championships back in the 1970s and ’80s.

The first two came in years when not many high schools fielded varsity soccer teams and Chapel Hill had just put together a squad. The school’s athletic director, Bob Culton, hired a kid fresh out of college named Charlie Dorr as the coach, and miracles happened about the same time Rainbow Soccer started in Chapel Hill.

Dorr was buddies with the late Kip Ward, a former UNC soccer player who started Rainbow with his college sweetheart Vickie Brawley. Rainbow was a different kind of recreational soccer league, where who won and by how much didn’t matter — it was to have fun and teach kids the sport.

Dorr was visiting Ward when he got the Chapel Hill gig. I can’t remember the names of anyone who played on those 1972 and ’74 Tiger teams, but some of them are still around Chapel Hill and are now in their 60s. It was a magical time for a team with some kids who had moved here when their parents took jobs at UNC and were familiar with the sport.

They helped teach soccer to their teammates who were great athletes just taking up the game. It was almost unheard of — a school that had just started an interscholastic soccer program winning state championships in its first and third years of existence.

The Chapel Hill boys won again in 1983 after Dorr had moved on and, finally, won their fourth last fall… 34 years later.