For Georgia soccer, it all comes down to this.

From the opening whistle of the Bulldogs’ SEC Tournament opener tonight at 8:30 in Orange Beach, Ala., the team’s mission will be a simple one: bring home an SEC championship.

“That’s what we want. That’s what we’ve said since freshman year when we set foot on this campus is that we wanted to turn this program into one that had an SEC championship,” said senior midfielder Lindsay Stein.

What may not be so simple, however, is accomplishing that mission.

For the second straight year, the fifth-seeded Bulldogs (14-4-1, 7-4-0 SEC) will square off against the fourth-seeded South Carolina Gamecocks (15-3-1, 7-3-1 SEC) in an SEC tournament opener. Georgia has claimed the last two meetings between the squads, including a 2-1 defeat of the Gamecocks in the first round of last year’s SEC tournament.

The Bulldogs won by the same score earlier this season in Athens, handing then fifth-ranked and undefeated South Carolina their first defeat of the 2009 campaign.

Despite their recent success against the Gamecocks, the Georgia players realize their past isn’t going to win them games in Orange Beach.

“Everything’s different when you get to Orange Beach, and you just have to take it a game at a time. People play differently and upsets happen. People go far and people lose in the first round so I mean anything can happen,” said Stein. “We feel really good, though, especially having a recent win against them.”

Should the Bulldogs continue their recent success against South Carolina this evening, the road to an SEC Championship will only get rockier from there. This year’s eight-team tournament field is one of the deepest in recent memory, with five of the eight squads in the Ratings Percentage Index top-25, Georgia being one of the five sitting at number 18.

“This is probably, top to bottom, the most competitive group of eight teams that have gone to Orange Beach. We know that from here on out, we’ll be going up against NCAA tournament teams,” said Georgia head coach Patrick Baker.

Even with the high level of competition they’ll be going up against, senior goalkeeper Michelle Betos is confident that if the Bulldogs play their game, they can hang with anybody.

“If we come to play, there aren’t many teams that are going to beat us,” said Betos.

The Bulldogs know what it takes to make it to an SEC Championship, having made the finals the previous two seasons despite coming up painfully short on both occasions. The Bulldogs lost 4-1 to Florida in the 2007 finals and then dropped a heartbreaker, 1-0, a season ago to Tennessee. This year, Betos hopes, will be different.

“I think we’re just hungry. I know personally, I’ve had two championship games that have been unsuccessful and I think that my class is ready to come out on the other side of that,” she said.

The Bulldogs’ regular-season play seems to have turned heads around the SEC and has perhaps earned the team a bit of respect heading into the tournament, as three Bulldogs took home All-SEC honors, the league office announced Tuesday.

Senior forward Carrie Patterson earned first-team All-SEC honors for the fourth consecutive season, becoming just the fourth player in SEC history to do so. Patterson is also Georgia’s 29th student-athlete in all sports to earn four first-team All-SEC selections.

Freshman Laura Eddy was named SEC Freshman of the Year and was also named to the All-SEC Freshman squad and second team All-SEC. Freshman Susannah Dennis was also named to the All-SEC freshman team.

With a win tonight, the Bulldogs will advance to the semifinals to take on the winner of the first round match between top-seeded Florida and eighth-seeded Tennessee in a game slated for 8:30 p.m. Friday.