The Mehlville Senior High School varsity boys’ soccer team will continue its quest for a state championship Saturday against Chaminade.

The Panthers will square off against the Red Devils at 2:30 p.m. at Chaminade. Mehlville needs just three more wins to capture the state title, but first the Panthers will have to get by Chaminade, long regarded as one of the top soccer programs statewide.

Saturday’s matchup will be a tough challenge for his squad, according to Mehlville head coach Tom Harper.

“They are one of the best teams in the area for a reason,” he told the Call. “There’s a couple things that are true about them. They are going to be very talented, of course, just like all the teams at this time of year … But they are also not going to beat themselves, and that’s the sign of a championship-caliber team is you don’t beat yourself when the going gets tough.

“And that’s going to be hard for us. So we’re going to have to force them into situations where they make critical mistakes in the key areas of the game and they just don’t do that very often.”

Despite the reputation and caliber of Chaminade, Harper and his players believe they have a real good chance at getting past the Red Devils.

“We understand that at some point you’re going to have to beat the best teams around,” he said. “Unfortunately, we drew one of the best teams around to get to the Final Four. So we are very happy that we are at this point, but we also know the reality of the situation, and we know what’s ahead of us.”

To get to this point, Mehlville knocked off Oakville 3-1 last week week to win its first district title since 2007. On Tuesday, the Panthers beat Northwest 3-2 in double overtime.

Kenan Selimovic plotted the game-winner in double overtime, while Mehlville’s leading goal scorer, Abdulah Jahic, scored the other two goals for the Panthers against Northwest.

The Panthers scored first, but then gave up two goals to Northwest’s Mitchell Lacy, before getting the equalizer in the second half to force the overtime.

“That game was everything we thought it was going to be,” Harper said. “We knew that they would have a good game plan and that they would execute that plan against us. Coach (Dave) Willis does a good job over there at getting his kids prepared for every match, and we knew they’d be ready for us having played them earlier in the year.

“We were also very aware that they had a handful of very dangerous players. Mitchell Lacy made himself very well-known in that game, scoring two pretty brilliant goals against us to put them up. They were a handful and that’s what we expected … We expected them to be skilled enough to cause some problems for us and they kind of broke us out of our rhythm.”

When the time came to start the second overtime, Mehlville players made a decision before they took the field, according to Harper.

“As tired and beat up as the boys were, they knew they were probably only going to get a handful of chances,” the coach said. “And the common talk in the huddle before they went out there before the second overtime was they didn’t want to leave it up to chance in a penalty-kick situation.

“Fortunate for us, Kenan was able to get there and punch that third goal in, and it was everything we’d been talking about for the last 30 minutes of play and finally it came to fruition for us.”