Bishop Guertin coach Bradk Kreick, right, and the Cardinals bench liked what they saw in the final moments of the Cards' 66-51 Division I semifinal win over Pinkerton Tuesday night in Exeter. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

EXETER – The scoreboard wasn’t telling a pretty story early on for the Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball team on Tuesday night.

The scorebook about 90 minutes later told an ugly story instead for the Cards’ opponents from Pinkerton Academy.

It said 28 fouls for the Astros, 11 for the Cards, and that made all the difference in a 66-51 Guertin Division I semifinal win that puts the No. 5, 18-3 Cards in a state title game rematch with No. 2 Bedford Sunday at 4 p.m. at the University of New Hampshire’s Lundholm Gym.

The Bulldogs beat Portsmouth, 45-24, in the first semifinal here last night.

The No. 1, 18-2 Astros, who beat the Cards by eight during the regular season for BG’s only in-state loss, started last night’s game exactly how they wanted, up 8-0 and later 21-9 in the second quarter. The last thing anyone at the Exeter High School gym felt was they would be outscored 57-30 the rest of the way.

The foul situation had a lot to do with it – three Astros ended up fouling out – and so did the Cardinals style of play as they rarely shot from the outside and attacked the basket, helping to draw whistle after whistle.

“Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, our kids will attack the basket,” Cards coach Brad Kreick said. “Sometimes it’s not under control, but they did a pretty good job staying composed getting to the rim tonight. That’s something we’ve been working on.

“I think if you attack people, and you do it under control, more often than not, that aggression pays off.”

Guertin took full advantage, going 29 for 39 from the line, including a 16-for-20 performance from junior guard Brooke Paquette, who finished with a game-high 32 points.

Suddenly, the aggression the Astros showed early on disappeared as they became tentative, their lead disappearing midway through the second quarter as the teams went into halftime deadlocked at 31.

“We were all working on the same cylinder as a team,” Astros coach Lani Buskey said. “Then the foul trouble happened, I had to make some subs. The role players are fantastic, but we lost a little bit of offense when that happened, and you saw us get a little more hesitant. You can’t get hesitant, BG’s too good.

“And then the foul trouble became a hindrance. You’re in foul trouble, you’re guarded in how you play. Your aggression, you don’t realize it, but you take a step back. … You can’t hang with BG if you’re in foul trouble, and you can’t put them at the line, and we did.”

But that 12-point deficit for the Cards was clear danger for elimination.

“We could’ve gone night-night right there,” Kreick said of the early 12 point deficit. “We felt if we could get it to single digits by halftime, we’ve got a shot. And they just kept banging away, we look up and it’s 31-31 at halftime, and I’m like ‘How the heck did that happen?’ Credit to the kids they just kept competing.”

“I feel like we had to come back, keep up the intensity, rebound, be better on defense,” Paquette said. “I feel that was one of our struggling points in the beginning. We just had to clean up our defense and it got us back.”

And that all carried over into the second half as when they emerged from the locker room, while it took a quarter, Guertin just took control. A Paquette 3-pointer gave Guertin the lead for good, 34-33, just 1:37 into the third quarter. It was 44-41 after three, and a 12-0 run, with Hannah Lynch scoring six of those points, put Guertin in control midway through the quarter. It was over.

“I feel like we were taking a lot more chances,” Paquette said. “We were locking up on defense, we were driving more, we were kicking (the ball out) when it was there. We just had more flow on offense, more patience, and we got better looks.”

And, as Buskey said, got plenty of chances from the line. “They went to the line 36 times, and we went 12,” she said. “You’re not going to win a game that way.”

As the Astros lost confidence, the Cards were simply gaining it. The Astros got 20 points from Elizabeth Lavoie and 11 from Kristina Packowski, but lost senior leader Avah Ingalls, as well as Alexandra White and Becca Farnum to fouls. The Ingalls loss, with 6:18 left, was huge.

Meanwhile, Guertin got 12 points from Lynch and 10 from Liv Murray.

“Liv Murray in the second half, we put the ball in her hands a bunch to take the pressure off Brooke,” Kreick said. “And (Lynch) was just awesome. She and Molly Smith were awesome.”

It was just a textbook second half for Guertin.

“They just did a much better job in the second half of doing the basics over and over again,” Kreick said. “I wish I could tell you (defensively) that it was something we did tactically or coaching wise, the kids just dug in. They just dug in.”

And, Kreick said, there’s a reason for that.

“The bumps and bruises we took during the course of the year with the schedule we played, we played a lot of games that were tight at halftime, just sort of grinding games,” Kreick said. “This was tied at halftime, we talked about two or three things, and we came out and played clean in the second half. That’s a function of a lot of things, but mostly we’ve got tough kids, and they got used to playing in hard environments all year long and it hardened them up.”

So when they looked at the scoreboard early, there was no panic.

And when they saw it at the end, there was celebration.