The article below originally appeared in the San Mateo Daily Journal and is being reprinted with permission.

The College of San Mateo softball team won a huge game over the weekend, defeating nine-time defending Coast Conference champion Ohlone College 1-0.

The win gives the Bulldogs a two-game lead in the Coast Conference North Division with five remaining on the regular season schedule.

All this is good news. But, talking to CSM head coach Nicole Borg, you get the impression that no one in a Bulldogs uniform is counting their chickens just yet.

“I don’t really feel like we’re in the driver’s seat,” Borg said. “I feel like we’re still going along for the ride and we’re trying to win as many games as possible. We had a three-game lead [on Ohlone] last year and we ended up losing league so, you know what, it’s taking it one game at time, not looking at what we’ve done so far and winning one game at a time. We have to go out there and play our best.”

Such a response can be expected from the CSM coach given last year’s fumble at the end of the season. But with a two-game lead (meaning CSM’s magic number to clinch the North Division is four), it might not be such a crime to look ahead a bit.

CSM is riding a 16-game winning streak, the longest such streak in the state. The Bulldogs are 5-0 this season against their remaining opponents. In those five wins, the combined score is 65-2. And of those five, only Ohlone has a winning record — the rest have won 10 of their 51 games.

Basically, there is very little not to like about CSM’s road toward their first outright conference title in the Borg era.

“It doesn’t matter who our opponent is,” Borg said. ”I truly honestly can say I’m not even looking at record and I remind our players of that every day. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done up to now. We have to keep winning games.”

Borg and the Bulldogs do have reason to try and steer the Focus Mobile in that “one-game-at-a-time” direction. Last season, after a huge win against Ohlone at around the same time of the year, CSM lost two of their next three games. Then they went on to lose two 1-0 games in the year’s final week to surrender the conference title to Ohlone.

“I hope that doesn’t happen,” Borg said, “and I think it’s definitely a different group. I’ve learned to not get too ahead of the game and take it one game at a time. If you do that, you keep your emotions as low as possible going into every game. I think our mentality is different, we have kids that really don’t like to lose. We had that last year, we just have more weapons this year and we have a big buy-in from our kids and they understand that you have to take it one day at a time and not count anybody out.”

CSM got another hell of an effort from Michelle Pilster on Saturday, picking up her 23rd win of the season, surrendering seven hits along the way.

But the key to Saturday’s win?

“We played really, really good defense and scored one run,” Borg said. “We had a pretty good first inning offensively and pretty much got shut down after that. Hit the ball a few times, but right at somebody. But we played phenomenal defense. Any time a ball got hit, we made big plays behind Pilster.

“When they made errors, we didn’t capitalize on them. One-nothing ballgame, it was tight all the way through, you don’t want to leave people on base as many times we did, but they also did as well.”

CSM visits Foothill College on Tuesday, followed by a game against San Francisco City College on Thursday. First pitch for both games is scheduled for 3 p.m.