Nashua South's Rhett Medling gets harrassed by Alvirne's Anthony Ferullo as teammate Brendan Graham looks on during the Broncos' 50-39 win Wednesday night at the Belanger Gym. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA — Break up the Broncos? If it weren’t for a scant few points, we’d be saying that right now about the Alvirne High School boys basketball team.

They could very easily be 4-0 after Wednesday night’s 50-39 win over Nashua South at the Belanger Gym. But instead they evened their record at 2-2.

“We’re 2-2, but we keep telling the guys, because of the way we play defense, because of how hard we work, we’re 2-2 because of five points,” Alvirne coach Leo Gershgorin said.

Those were in a one-point loss to Merrimack on opening night and a four-point loss in overtime to Bishop Guertin. And it looked like another nailbiter was in the works Wednesday night at the Belanger Gym with Alvirne and Nashua South in a 37-all battle after three quarters.

But South didn’t score a point in the final period until a meaningless layup with just 23 seconds left. And after a 22-17 lead after the first period, during which freshman Josh Caruso scored all but two of his team-high 14 points, they scored just 17 points the rest of the night.

All of that was confounding to Panthers coach Nate Mazerolle, who watched Alvirne big man Brendan Graham score a game-high 28 points.

“Free throws and layups,”Mazerolle said, lamenting too many South misses as they have a week off after a 2-3 start. “And their big had a great game. We did not (have an answer for him). We tried a couple of different things.”

It was a battle all night between Graham and South’s 6-8 Rhett Medling (11 points), and Graham eventually won it, scoring 10 of his points in the decisive fourth quarter.

“Just relenteless,” Gershgorin said. “What you can say. Relentless. When he’s focused on doing his job, not worried about the reffing (officiating), not worrying about what else is going on. He’s just relentless. You can’t teach that … He just kept going after it, going after it. We told him, ‘A lot of guys will think you’re slow, but no, no, no, you’re quick. Use your quickness, a lot of guys won’t expect it.”

“We wanted it more,” Graham said. “We had the heart, the motor, the skill to get it done, we just wanted it more at the end of the day. The overtime loss hurt us, and we came back, non-stop working, we wanted it way bad tonight, super bad.”

Eric Allard added eight for Alvirne.

“It’s all the guys,” Gershgorin said. “At halftime we were giving up too many points in transition, and way too many second chance opportunities on the weak side. … Just get back on defense, man, stop giving up all these layups.”

And in the second half, after leading 30-27 at the break, the Panthers were missing a lot of those layups, plus they only went to the line seven times all night.

“I have no other answers other than that was one of the toughest ones I can remember in recent history, just because we totally broke down,” Mazerolle said. “We worked hard defensively, I’ll give them that. But you’re a varsity basketball team in Division I, you’ve got to score more than nine points in a half.”

Break up the Broncos? In this case, maybe blame it on them, too.