More than four months after losing their opening fixture of the season 5-1 to Knights, Olympic looked a transformed side and could count themselves unlucky to again finish pointless.

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"When you reflect on that round one game and the way we played today, we're a totally different team," Gaetani said. "I'm disappointed but the result was probably fair in the end. There were chances at both ends. They took one, but apart from that it was fairly even."

Experienced striker Alex Leszczynski netted the game's only goal from a 17th-minute free-kick and although the second half was goalless, it was full of incident.

Aaron Campbell twice struck the bar within six minutes of the restart, Jarrod Hill produced another goalkeeping masterclass capped off by a second penalty save in three weeks, and Will Humphrey was shown a red card following an apparent foul only to see it immediately retracted when his opponent appeared to tell the ref he had slipped.

For the first hour at Darcy Street, it was a similar story for Launceston City, Lachlan Clark also putting on a clinic in goal and restricting Ken Morton's men to the solitary goal scored by the coach's son Nick on 19 minutes.

However, the pressure eventually told as Kobe Kemp and Alex Walter scored within two minutes of each other and Kemp added another soon after before a composed finish from Noah Mies made the final score 4-1.

Devonport all but sealed the title with a 4-1 win over nearest rival Olympia at Valley Road while Hobart Zebras won 3-0 at Clarence.

Launceston United kept the title race alive by producing the most eye-catching result of the season.

Undefeated with just seven goals conceded in 15 previous matches, ladder leaders Northern Rangers were humbled 5-0 on their own patch by their neighbours.

Yasin Mohammadi, Sam Lowe, Chris Pickering, Fahim Moradi and an own goal had coach Glenn Reading beaming.

"Our biggest win of the season," he said. "We put our chances away where on other days we haven't done that."

Rangers coach Rod Fulton said it was a perfect storm of player unavailability combined with United's exceptional performance.

"We live to fight another day," he said.

A Will Nichols hat-trick proved the difference as Burnie won 4-2 at last season's champions Riverside.

Chris Byard also netted for the visitors while Riverside's best moments came from Mitch Roberts' tidy finish, Rhys Kinslow's ruthless penalty conversion and coach Andy Hall's post-match analysis.

"Like a grandmother's quilt, we were good in patches," said the Windsor Park wordsmith.

"We can't blame it on joining the NPL because we've still got a lot of good players."

Launceston City went down 2-1 at Ulverstone but had the consolation of sealing back-to-back under-18 titles with a 5-0 win which keeps them unbeaten with four games remaining.