Nashua South's Jeremiah Mitchell shoots past the reach of Bishop Guertin's Dylan Santosuosso during Tuesday night's clash at the Colligadome. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – Call it a dress rehearsal.

Basically, that’s what Tuesday night’s 56-39 Bishop Guertin boys basketball win over Nashua South at the Colligadome was.

That’s because, as we’re seeing throughout this week, the two teams are scheduled to see each other right back at BG next Monday in a Division I play-in game.

It will be a film poured over by both teams.

“They’ll watch it, I’ll watch it and try to figure some things out,” Guertin coach John Fisher said. “We need to play better, consistently. And hope things go well here Monday.”

“This was it, we knew that,” Nashua South coach Nate Mazerolle said. “We know matchups a little bit better, we got to see quite a bit of what they run, who knows if they’ll be running the same thing.

“But what we take from this is we know we can play with them, and we’re very confident we can beat them.”

Why are the 4-7 Panthers confident? Because after Guertin came out of the gates quick and smacked them in the mouth with an early 16-2 lead, South came right back with a 21-5 run of its own, and actually led 28-26 at the half.

But South only scored 11 points in the second half, and that certainly wasn’t going to stop BG from improving to 13-4 with its fifth straight win.

Jeremiah Mitchell led South with 10 points while Cody Rocheleau added eight. But the Panthers just needed more offense. And coming back from big deficits can take a little bit out of you.

“All of them fought, that’s what we’ve been building for all season,” Mazerolle said. “All I told them was what mattered to me was the effort tonight. The third quarter really hurt us. We just didn’t execute the offense the way we did earlier. That’s kind of when things went the wrong way.”

That’s when BG closed out the quarter with a 9-1 run to lead 40-32. They extended that run to 16-1 to lead 47-32 and that did it.

However, just because this was a game that didn’t impact any seedings didn’t mean it wasn’t competitive.

“I know a lot of kids on that team and we’ve been jawing back and forth for weeks,” said Guertin’s Lucas Baker, who had 13 points, second on the team behind Dylan Santosuosso’s 14 but ahead of Nate Kane’s 11. “Obviously, the Nashua rivalry, I think we all came in hyped.

“They kind of left me open for the jumper so I thought I’d keep stroking.”

And a lot of those strokes came in the first quarter (four field goals), but what about after the Panthers stormed back?

“We knew right when they came back, we were ‘All right, we need to come back with the same energy we had in the first couple of minutes’,” Baker said. “I thought we did in that in the second half, and I think that’s why we pulled out the win.”

“They knew what to do,” Fisher said. “They knew that was not us, some of the silly stuff … That can give you a false sense of security, starting a game like that. … It doesn’t take much. We knew before the game (South) was going to play hard. One of the advantages of being in close games before, (the Cards) had the tenacity to fight back.”

And one of the advantages of playing an opponent the week before you play them in the tournament is familiarity.

Let’s see who learned their lines the best when the stage lights shine bright.

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