As hot as Hartford Athletic has been running, you could have understood if Saturday night’s game at Monterey Bay FC could have delivered a bump in its momentum.

Facing a team that’s underperformed its metrics this season – hence its spot at bottom of the Western Conference – on two days rest, factoring in cross-country travel and the potential hangover of advancing to the first final in club history with Wednesday night’s 3-1 win in the Semifinals of the USL Jägermeister Cup, Hartford went with almost a full rotation in its lineup. Only Antony Siaha – a must against his former club – Sebastian Anderson and captain Jordan Scarlett remained.

And it just didn’t matter, because of course it didn’t.

Hartford’s 4-0 victory at Cardinale Stadium wasn’t maybe as lopsided as the final score indicated – Monterey Bay had chances, and a combination of wastefulness and Siaha’s three-save shutout kept them at bay – but when the visitors got into their flow, what followed felt inevitable.

• MAKE IT COUNT: Take Jack Panayotou’s opening goal, for example. In regular circumstances, you see this sort of chance regularly – a counterattack develops, one of the frontrunners gets a chance to cut onto their preferred foot at the top of the penalty area, and more often than not it goes off target or straight at the goalkeeper. Not for Panayotou, whose curled finish to the top-left corner was beautifully executed.

• SUPER-SUB EDWARDS: If there was a blemish on the night for Athletic, it was the early withdrawal of Hadji Barry shortly before halftime as he came off under his own power. If you’re going to have a player to bring on as an attacking reinforcement in the USL Championship this season, though, Kyle Edwards has been the man. Once again, the St. Vincent and the Grenadines international showed his knack for being in the right place to bag a pair of goals that put the game to bed before Anderson delivered the fourth in stoppage time.

• CLOSING THE GAP: Hartford’s victory moved it within a point of the top four in the Eastern Conference with their sixth victory in the past seven games across all competitions. Whoever’s on the field for the side right now, everything is fitting together as Athletic closes in on a postseason berth and potentially its first silverware in next month’s USL Jägermeister Cup Final.

The night was a major one for Edwards, who equaled a pair of records. His two-goal performance moved him to 11 goals for the season, level with the recently departed Mamadou Dieng for a single-season high in Hartford’s history. As notable, he also moved to seven goals coming off the bench in the campaign, which tied the USL Championship’s single-season record for most goals by a substitute set by Matt Fondy when he played for Orange County SC in 2013.

Hartford’s rise, though, continues to be collective. Over its past 16 regular season games, the side has notched 33.86 Expected Goals, or 2.12xG per game. That’s a staggering rate – last year’s tremendous Louisville City attack averaged 1.95xG per game – and indicates the quality of chances Hartford is creating game-in and game-out.

With the confidence Head Coach Brendan Burke’s side is exhibiting, who knows how far this ride could carry them.