Let's rip the band-aid off, because you already know the number and it's a doozy. Zero from eighteen. A minus-366 differential that reads less like a points column and more like a lost phone number. Wooden spoon, engraved, mounted, swinging above the bar at Forshaw. If the ladder is your only scripture, the Rebels were the worst side in the Shute Shield by the length of the Randwick straight, and I'd never insult you by pretending otherwise.

But you didn't pull up a pew for the ladder. Budge up.

Because here's the twist the studio would've knocked back for being too far-fetched: this was the finest last-placed team these eyes have clapped on. Six times the Rebels went down by a converted try or less. Three of them in the opening three rounds - a four-pointer to the Pirates, then back-to-back three-point daggers off the Students and the Wildfires - gone before they'd finished lacing the sprigs. Add the whole sorry pile together and Souths lost half a dozen games of footy by eighteen points, combined. That's Sisyphus in a scrum cap: shove the boulder to the summit, wear it on the way back down, do it again next Saturday.

The 18-point season

Round 17 at TG Millner is the one that'll haunt the off-season. Two down, dying seconds, Blaise Barnes standing over a conversion he'd slot in his sleep to level it at 35-all. As a certain Founding Father hollered from the wings, he was not throwing away his shot. Reader, he threw away his shot - flush off the upright - and moments later the last-play maul was turned over on the death. It rhymed with the rest: Norths pipped them by three in Round 7 (the Game of the Round, since you asked), Hunter got them by three twice, Uni by three, Harbour by four. Six games, six gut-punches, and the cruel part is the tape says they belonged in every one.

The best player in the competition played for the worst team

And then, the skipper. In a year the footy gods clearly drew Souths' name from a hat marked "nah," Isaac Ratumaitavuki-Kneepkens went and souvenired the Ken Catchpole Medal - best player in the entire competition. Just ask the eighteen weekends of defenders left grasping at those twinkling toes; the referees only made it official. From stone-motherless last. If Southern Districts were Troy, Kneepkens was Hector: the finest man on the field, strapping on the armour week after week for a city that was never going to be saved. Then Fiji rang about the Pacific Nations Cup. When your captain is the best in the comp and your season's a big round zero, mate, you weren't beaten. You were mugged by the fine print.

The numbers hum the same tune

More than a third of Souths' scoring - 36 per cent - came in the final twenty, with 38 per cent of their tries to match. Read it for what it is, though: not the fingerprint of a great closer, but of a team forever behind and forever chasing, still swinging when the hooter loomed. The real trouble sat on the other side of the ball. Their defence was a Maginot Line with a golfer's yips - immovable until someone strolled round the flank, then the shakes: 196 points leaked in the 40-to-60 window, the fattest single-period haemorrhage any side managed all year. Score late, gift the lead straight back after oranges, rinse, repeat.

For a team that finished dead last they were loaded in odd corners. Start at the kicking tee: Struan Hutchison, then Blaise Barnes once he took over the duties around Round 11, both finished inside the competition's top handful of goalkickers, either side of 80 per cent. Barnes pulled double shifts too - a fullback who pilfered 16 turnovers across the season, ninth in the whole competition and the only No. 15 on a turnover leaderboard otherwise stacked with flankers and back-rowers. Raffles the gentleman thief, working the last line in a fullback's jumper. And in David Nicol they had the highlight reel: a 99-metre length-of-the-field special against Manly, an 80-metre jailbreak against Two Blues, the sort of tries that make you spill your schooner. Round 11's Ladies' Day at Forshaw was peak Souths - asleep for a half, then a second-half riot. Yeah, the girls were thriving in the marquee, Aperols up and phones out, and for a good while the footy nearly matched the vibe.

Where it came apart

The wheels, when they let go, let go spectacularly. Easts hung 101 on them in Round 9 (5-101, a scoreline you file under "we don't talk about that"), Norths piled on 71 in the finale, Warringah and Two Blues both cleared 47. Some of that was the draw. Some of it was a genuine hole: Mitieli Tuinakauvadra, their defensive keystone - a top-ten tackler and top-five for defenders beaten at halfway - went down injured around Round 13 and never got back. Pull that block and the whole tower goes full Jenga, and the back third of the season is exactly where the wall caved without him.

The hardest part to write

And then the hardest part of any season to write about, because this one's about a person, not a scoreline. Scott Fava is out. The club moved him on after the winless run, two seasons into a deal that was meant to run at least three. You can understand it - a year without a win puts enormous heat on everyone, and a board has its members to answer to. But it's worth sitting a moment with what it actually was for the man in the middle of it.

This was a homecoming. Fava first pulled on a Shute Shield jumper at Forshaw back in 1997, long before he became the first player ever to win the Ken Catchpole Medal three times over at Eastwood, before the Wallaby cap and the 74 Super Rugby games. He came back to where it all started to try and lift his old club off the canvas, and the ending carries its own quiet cruelty: he lost the job the very season his captain won the medal he'd claimed three times himself. He owned the results, but held firm that Souths sat further along than 0-18 lets on - and the tape gives him a fair hearing there. Six losses by a converted try or less, and the competition's best player wearing his skipper's armband, is not a club miles off the mark.

None of which rewrites the ledger, and none of which makes the decision wrong. But footy is people before it's points, and Fava gave this one the lot.

And the rebuild has quietly begun at the edges, even with the big chair still empty. The marquee move is off the paddock: Brad Harrington comes in as general manager, and it's no ceremonial hire. Harrington is a high-performance man who has spent two decades in the engine rooms of elite rugby - head of strength and conditioning for the Wallabies across two World Cup cycles, the same work for Argentina's Pumas around a third, plus the Waratahs' 2014 title side, Leinster, the Scarlets and a stint in Japan, after first cutting his teeth over in rugby league. A bloke who has physically prepared Test sides for World Cups, now steering a battling Shute Shield club off the field. That is a statement of intent you can't fake.

The colts, meanwhile, pass to Tetera Faulkner - a former Wallaby prop with the thick end of 150 Super Rugby games behind him, and a Souths old boy to boot, back at the club he propped the scrum for the best part of fifteen years ago. Handing the juniors to a man who knows exactly what that jumper weighs is the same long-game thinking. This is a repair job, not a demolition - a club rebuilding, quietly and cannily, through people who know what they're doing and, in Faulkner's case, already love the place.

The head coach's chair is the one still to fill, with no word yet on who picks up the clipboard, and whether a Kneepkens with Fiji now calling stays put is the other question hanging over 2027. Both can keep. For now it's enough to tip the hat to Scott Fava - a bloke who came home and had a proper go - and to nod to the ones stepping up to carry it on.