The day after the end of a season is when, by the laws of print journalism, we are required to do a retrospective.

The Pro League season ended Sunday, so for the Tuesday a.m. newspaper we printed our all-star team and a look back at the key factor in Al Jazira winning its first league championship.

Which was …

… the best batch of Emiratis in the league.

Everyone here, even Emiratis, tend to focus on the three foreigners that each club can bring in. Which is understandable, given that the UAE has very few scorers of note (about, two, actually), and like most countries needs guys who can put balls in nets.

That’s where the Brazilians and Africans come in. To score.

But if each team does its job and makes good decisions on its foreigners, it becomes something of a wash. Jazira’s three South Americans scored 28 goals, but Al Shabab’s four guys (one replaced another) had 26, and Al Nasr’s four had 23 …

That leaves it to your Emiratis to make the difference, and Jazira had the best crew of local players. One of them, the cool midfield marshal Ibrahim Diaky, is a native of Ivory Coast, but he has been naturalized, so he doesn’t count against Jazira’s three-player cap.

Four of Jazira’s regulars play with the national team, and a couple of others have, and those guys scored 36 goals, more than half of Jazira’s total of 64.

Having a team in which home-grown players outscored the foreigners is not particularly common here. Not until the end of the season, when some clubs had given up on their foreigners and were giving lots of playing time to local guys (and also letting them take nearly every penalty). At the end, four teams had more goals from Emiratis than expatriates, but Jazira was the only team to be like that all along.

Overall, foreigners — and remember, only three per team — scored more than half of the 444 goals scored this season, 230 of them, by my count, and I may be missing three or four scored by guys with Arabic names who were in-country early in the season and left.

The Pro League has just put in a rule allowing each team to recruit four foreigners in the coming season, the so-called three-plus-one rule. The “plus-one” guy has to be from Asia. Anyway, Emiratis figure to score an even smaller percentage of goals next season, with that fourth guy around.

UAE teams probably right this minute are studying the rosters of countries like Uzbekistan and Oman and other Asian nations with some good soccer but not a lot of money. Iraq and Syria, perhaps. Maybe even Iran, though Iran is  not the UAE’s favorite neighbor, at the moment and has a stronger league than does the UAE.

I wrote the all-star story, but I must give credit to colleagues Amith Passela and Ahmed Rizvi , each of whom gave me their version of the top 11 to help me make decisions on who ought to make the Elite Eleven and who didn’t. The interesting thing about that was how the three of us were in agreement on about eight of the 11 players. And on the other three, at least two of us were in accord.

So, now we are in the silly season, waiting to see who signs whom, where the coaches land, and in early September it all starts up again.