Let’s get the remarkable out of the way right now.

    Maria Sanchez is the most prolific goal scorer in Idaho soccer history, male or female, and regardless of classification.

    In American Falls, Sanchez is a transcendent talent, a once-in-a-generation kind of player.

    Sanchez scored 68 goals for the Beavers her senior year. A number that defies description or hyperbole.

    68 goals in 17 matches — numbers video game producers would shake their heads at in disbelief.

    She had a hat trick in 13 straight games, slammed the ball in the back of the net an average of four times every match and scored 13 times alone in the 3A 5th District tournament.

    Sanchez ends her high school career with 178 career goals. She had 34 as a freshman, 26 her sophomore season and 50 as a junior.

    The Idaho State Journal has named Sanchez its girls soccer co-player of the year.

    Her high school coach, Karissa Fisher, describes the senior as quiet off the field and a fireball on it. She’s soft spoken and courteous, humble and respectful. But when Sanchez steps on the pitch, she transforms and is replaced by someone else, someone with drive and intensity, a singularly focused soccer player in her element while playing the game she loves.

    “My mentality is just to score,” Sanchez said. “When they say, ‘oh it’s hard to do this or whatever,’ I don’t think about it. I know everything is possible, so that’s my mentality of doing things.”

    Sanchez isn’t bragging. She doesn’t brag. She’s describing a mindset cultivated playing with the boys. She didn’t master soccer through repetition of drills, competing in organized leagues as a youngster or by traveling across the United States on elite pay-to-play teams.

    Sanchez learned by playing with friends and family. She learned the game by hanging on to a ball all day, constantly dribbling it and refusing to stop even after she broke the lamp outside of her family’s house and was grounded. Sanchez learned soccer through a fixed prism of her own life’s experiences.

    So it was with a magical left foot that she took over high school soccer in the 3A classification.

    And any naysayer who wants to discount the goals she scored because of the competition level they came against should see her for themselves. She has verbally committed to play soccer for head coach Allison Gibson and the Idaho State Bengals.

    “Not only she is athletic, but she was born to play soccer,” Fisher said “So I think she’s in her element, and she has a lot of confidence there, confidence in her ability. ... Time after time she’s helped her team win.”

    As a junior, Sanchez and the Beavers won the 3A 5th District championship, and they went to the state tournament for the first time in seven years.

    This past season, American Falls went 14-5, claimed the district’s overall No. 1 seed but lost to Marsh Valley in the postseason tournament, cutting short Sanchez’s senior year.

    “I learned a lot from it,” she said. “You can’t always go in thinking you’re going to win, because that’s what we thought. We thought we were just going to take the district championship.

    “We were just imagining state, but we never really thought about districts. We never really finished our last games.”

    It wasn’t just the bitter ending that’s left an impression with Sanchez, either. Gibson has told her she’ll be the first girl in her program at Idaho State who has never played on a traveling team growing up.

    It’s meant that Sanchez has had to rely on her high school seasons to help prepare her for the college level. But just like how she couldn’t be dissuaded from playing soccer after breaking a lamp, the fact Sanchez has had fewer opportunities in the offseason hasn’t stemmed her momentum.

    “I wasn’t going to stop,” she said.

    And it doesn’t look like she’s about to now.