Youth soccer is all about having fun, right?

T he little girl with the dirty blond ponytail was killing us, dribbling through our entire team and scoring goals at will.

Even worse, she was jeopardizing our six-game winning streak and an undefeated season.

So at halftime, after the moms passed out the quartered oranges and the water bottles labeled with each girl’s name, I decided to take drastic action, despite our 5-3 lead.

I pulled aside my best defender and told her she was getting an assignment for the second half.

“You see No. 4 over there, the one who scored the three goals against us?” I told her. She nodded as she sucked on an orange slice. “Your job the rest of the game is to always know where she is on the field. When she gets the ball, I want you to go take it away from her. That’s your job.”

There. I had done it. I had “marked” a 6-year-old girl. Even worse, I had shown I actually cared about the outcome of what any rational person would characterize as a meaningless game.

Of course the strategy worked. We won by three or four goals as my defensive specialist shut down the sensation on the other team, and I felt like a complete moron.

This month, thousands of children and their parents will join in a ritual that has become as much a part of autumn as a trip to the apple orchard.

Another youth soccer season is upon us. Unfortunately, along with moments of great athleticism and sportsmanship, there will be parents screaming at referees for missing calls and pleading with their kids’ coaches to play their child more or at another position. And, of course, there will be those coaches who get lost in the excitement and see the game with the 6-year-olds scampering about as some kind of junior World Cup.

After coaching stints last fall and spring, I’m entering my third season as the coach of my daughter’s under-7 squad in New York’s West Side Soccer League, so I consider myself something of an amateur at all this as I search for that fine line between fun and competition. Do the other coaches of the under-7 teams begin thinking about the games hours before the first whistle, or feel their hearts rise and fall when a shot grazes the outside of the goal post?

It all began innocently. When I started playing youth soccer in the 1970s, there were no girls teams, and the brave girls who joined the co-ed teams often got relegated to defense for two quarters, the minimum amount of time league rules mandated for each player.

Nearly three decades later, girls soccer has become a national phenomenon, and there is no greater thrill for me than watching my daughter and her contemporaries compete on a field of their own. They’ll knock each other down and pick each other up in ways I don’t remember doing when I played. In one close game, a girl from my daughter’s swim class scored on us. My daughter gave her a high-five.

I do my best to follow that spirit and try to improve on the behavior of the fathers who coached us when we were kids – the guy who refused to take out his superstar son with his team up by 11 goals in the third quarter, or the one who chased the referee across the field after a goal on a penalty kick cost his son’s team the game. (That is not a joke.)

Usually, I do a decent job. I am obsessive about making sure the girls get the same amount of playing time regardless of their ability or the score of the game. To avoid running up the score, I start taking players off the field if we’re ahead by four or five goals in the second half. One mother didn’t like this and sent her daughter back onto the field after I had taken her out. I explained after the game that I was trying not to make the other team feel bad, which she thought was ridiculous.

“Whatever, you’re the coach,” she said as she stormed off.

So what in the world was I doing “marking” that 6-year-old?

The move is easy to rationalize. After all, I was teaching one of my players about one-on-one defense, and showing the rest of the team what happens when a teammate focuses on something other than scoring goals.

But the truth is this: I wanted to win the game. I wanted my girls to score more goals than the other team, which had the best player on the field but not much else. I wanted my team to remain undefeated, even though there are no playoffs or final standings, and every kid on every team gets the same size trophy in 21st-century recreational youth soccer. Given the chance, I’d probably even want each of the players on last spring’s juggernaut back every season.

Pop psychologists might suggest I’m living out my own unrealized athletic dreams, still trying to win games that I lost years ago.

It won’t work, and it’s an easy way to make a fool of yourself. Indeed, competition is going to be a major part of our children’s lives, and lessons learned on the field of play can certainly translate to other areas, but my sense is the best lesson for soccer players not yet 7 years old is that obsessing about winning is bad for their health. Most of them can’t even keep track of the score and forget the outcome half an hour after the final whistle.

Here’s a question I guarantee every father of a young player has heard: “Daddy, did we win today?”

So this season I have this revolutionary idea of what I’ll do when some fireball on the other side scores a bunch of goals against us – I’m going to cheer for her.

My players will understand this just fine. It’s the grown-ups I’m worried about.