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Scrappy Cards mount stunning comback to beat Bedford

By Tom King - Staff Writer | Jan 18, 2021

Bishop Guertin's Kailee McDonald, right, and Bedford's Catherine Penick battle for the ball during the first half of BG's 69-64 comeback win Sunday in Bedford. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

BEDFORD – It certainly looked like they were getting a taste of their own medicine.

For the first 16 minutes of Sunday’s big Division I game with host Bedford, the Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball team was experiencing what it has been doing to opponents for the last five years.

“I don’t like that feeling very much,” Cards coach Brad Kreick said after his team’s stunning 69-64 comeback win over the Bulldogs. “I don’t like that feeling very much, but good for them for hanging in.”

The Cardinals fell behind early 10-3, were down 24-9 after the first quarter, 46-28 at halftime. The Bulldogs’ 6-2 freshman Lana McCarthy was having her way, with 14 points in the books, and standout senior Isabella King had 18.

The Cards, who hadn’t lost against a New Hampshire team since right on this same court almost three years to the day (Jan. 16, 2018), were looking their age – mainly sophomores. This was foreign territory.

“I don’t remember being in a situation like that,” Kreick said. “All the credit to the kids. We made one minor adjustment. … But this wasn’t about coaching. This wasn’t about Xs and Os; this was about a bunch of kids who put their head down and just grinded it out in the second half.

“Good for them.”

It was an amazing comeback, given how dominant the Bulldogs looked, aided by BG forward Meghan Stack’s first-half foul trouble. Kreick has a rule where if a player has two fouls in the first half they sit until the third quarter, and he stuck to it, giving McCarthy an open path to the hoop.

But in the second half, King managed just two points, McCarthy had eight, and Stack 11 of her 14 points. That was tied for the team high with Liv Murray, whose cool-as-a-cucumber free throw shooting – an incredible 9 for 9 in the fourth quarter – buoyed the win. Guertin was 19 of 23 from the line in the second half (31 of 40 overall), cut the deficit to 54-43 after three quarters with a 13-3 run to end the period, and then held the Bulldogs scoreless for nearly the first six minutes of the final quarter in grabbing a 58-54 lead it wouldn’t relinquish, and King had just fouled out. BG’s Kailee McDonald hit a huge 3-pointer with three minutes left.

“Free throws, layups, rebounds,” Kreick said, explaining the comeback. “We did a nice job hitting our free throws down the stretch and we were able to keep that four, six, seven point lead because we kept hitting our free throws, that made things a lot easier.”

“I was just thinking, ‘This is just like practice,'” Murray said. “It was a lot of pressure, but I’ve been practicing.

“We just knew we could come back in the second half, and out work them.”

Indeed, a tale of two halves that left the Bulldogs, for whom this was their season opener, stunned.

“We allowed them to speed us up,” Bedford coach Kevin Gibbs said. “All the things that brought us success in the first half, we got away from it in the third quarter. We stopped moving on offense, we stopped moving as well on defense. I think even though we talked about it, the kids looked up, saw the score, and figured ‘We don’t have to play as hard’, perhaps. I don’t know. … What hurts is we had that game and we gave it up.”

And Guertin’s young team, now 2-0, may have grown up.

“They just picked up their intensity,” Kreick said. “It wasn’t pretty, necessarily in the second half, but they picked up their intensity. We started playing better defense, started running, and we got back into our rotation.

“I think a lot of teams would have packed in it in and said, ‘We’re down 18 at halftime, who do we play Tuesday?. We didn’t do that.'”

They host Londonderry Tuesday, and the Cards hope those familiar feelings are back in the right order.

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