Bishop Guertin's Adam Gnanou, shown here last week vs. Salem, had a touchdown in the 29-13 loss to Londonderry Friday night. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

LONDONDERRY – Any Division I football teams who don’t realize the obvious should beware if they have Londonderry on the schedule this year:

As soon as they seem stoppable, the Lancers will likely zap that illusion with a big play.

Bishop Guertin stayed within striking distance of Londonderry for much of the way Friday night, but couldn’t avoid all the lightning strikes created by the Lancers, falling 29-13. It was the Cardinals’ first loss in the season’s first three games while Londonderry improved to 3-0.

“They’re super aggressive on defense, they’re very, very fast, they’re very physical,” BG coach John Trisciani said. “And you know that those Londonderry teams are always very well coached, so it was about what we would expect.

“We feel like we were only a few plays away from really making it interesting.”

That feeling had some merit. Londonderry held just a 7-0 lead as halftime approached, thanks to a 16-yard touchdown run by Andrew Kullman to cap their first drive of the night.

But with 1:45 left in the first half the Lancers embarked on a march that started on their 32 and ended with a 37-yard catch-and-run from Aidan Washington to Jake Schena for a touchdown. A toss from Washington to Colby Ramshaw for the 2-point conversion brought the halftime score to 15-0.

“It was the first time this year we’ve been in a situation where we’re down. So there were some teaching moments there,” Trisciani said. “We faced some adversity and we just tried to tell the kids that we just want them to battle all the way to the end, to see it all the way through.”

It stayed 15-0 until Schena took off on a 58-yard scoring run with four seconds left in the third quarter.

Guertin had some success moving the ball to that point, but saw its efforts thwarted by their own miscues and Londonderry’s defense, which came in having outscored Merrimack and Nashua South 78-6 in its first two games.

“We played pretty good defense for the most part,” Trisciani said. “What we have to do is start finishing some of these offensive drives. We went on a couple of drives where were moving the ball pretty well, but then we get into the red zone and we start stalling out.”

Charlie Bellavance, BG’s offensive workhorse with 65 rushing yards on 14 carries, got the Cardinals on the board with a 16-yard touchdown run with 9:18 left in the game.

And the Cards enjoyed a particularly big play of their own when Adam Gnanou raced 70 yards on a kickoff return with 4 minutes left.

“We’re trying to find some consistency,” Trisciani said. “Charlie Bellavance did a good job carrying the ball, he’s our running back, he’s a big boy. And Matt Santosuosso pretty much does everything for us, he popped a couple of runs there.

“They have a lot of really good players. They’re going to continue to get better. That’s definitely a playoff team as long as they stay healthy.”

Presumably the rest of Division I has received that message at this point.

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