Charly Cardilicchia didn’t waste much time contemplating what had just occurred on a rain-soaked Saturday evening at Westhills Stadium.

“Hats off to the Raiders,” he said shortly after his Westshore Rebels dropped a 21-7 result to the Vancouver Island Raiders in the B.C. Football Conference’s Cullen Cup final. “At the end of the day, it’s something that we’re going to take from this.

“For myself personally as a coach, I’m going to learn from this. That’s a lot of gas in my tank right now and I’ll be right back to recruiting tomorrow. I’ll tell you what, we’re going to bring a championship back to the city and we’re going to bring a national championship to the city. Kudos to the Raiders and congratulations to them.”

Already looking ahead to next season, Cardlicchia — who was named BCFC coach of the year in his rookie campaign — will have some big names to replace.

Defensive line standouts Kent Hicks and Jeremie Drouin both graduate, as does quarterback Scott Borden Jr. and impressive offensive lineman Tyson Thompson. Christian Krause — who might be the best offensive lineman in the country and missed the Cullen Cup final due to a knee injury — is likely going back to university. Marly Cliff-Delcy, Eddy Nyomgwa and Morgan D’Ganigan are among some of the others to graduate.

“It was definitely disappointing, especially with the season we had and being a 22-year-old. I wish the outcome would’ve been better, but that’s football and that’s how it is,” Drouin said of the outcome. “We should’ve protected the ball better and passed better. There were a couple things we needed to do better. I think defensively we played a hell of a game.”

The disappointing finish was etched across many of the Rebels' faces.

“It’s tough to take, especially being a 22-year-old and knowing that this is your last season playing with these guys,” said Drouin, who had six tackles in the loss and two quarterback sacks. “It’s never the same. Like last year’s championship team wasn’t like this team, and I’ll never get to play with this group of guys again.”

Drouin already has a couple of Canadian university offers and he was at the CFL combine last year so he will need to evaluate what his future entails.

Right now, he and his Rebels teammates will have the memory of a rough final team outing to erase from their minds.

The offensive statistics told an ugly tale for both teams and if you were looking solely at the Raiders’ numbers, one would be perplexed to understand how they won the game.

The visitors totalled just 148 yards of net offence compared to 315 for the Rebels. Raiders quarterback Jake Laberge completed just five of 18 passes for 54 yards, but two of those were for major scores. Westshore’s Borden. Jr. was a dismal 5-of-21 for 50 yards with three interceptions in the downpour. The Rebels also fumbled once and turned over the ball three times on downs.

“That was a massive part of this game,” Cardilicchia said of the turnovers. “Three interceptions, we haven’t turned the ball over like that all year. We threw four all year and today with threw three in one game. That was a very telling stat. We couldn’t get the ball rolling or flowing.”

They also lost receivers Kaine Stevenson (who had the only Rebels’ touchdown of the game) and Nate Skeete to injury and, having only dressed six receivers, they were down to four.

Running back Trey Campbell ran 25 times for 137 yards on a wet night where protecting the ball was imperative. Zander Bailey, named offensive MVP of the game, had 25 carries for 113 yards for VI. Stevenson’s score was off a 77-yard run play.

Defensive MVP of the game Shawn Arabsky had two of the three interceptions, while Dexter Shea and Quinton Bowles each had nine tackles for the Raiders.

“Coming into the game our defence has been playing better every week,” said Raiders head coach Doug Hocking, whose troops now prepare to face the defending national champion Saskatoon Hilltops for the right to travel to Ontario for the 2017 Canadian Bowl.

“They [the Rebels] had a lot of playmakers. We knew we had our work cut out for us, but we have a lot of playmakers on defence. We have guys who play in the system and play disciplined, and we knew if we did that we had a chance.”