The Bishop Guertin girls celebrate their Division I basketball title win over Bedford on Sunday in Durham. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

DURHAM – Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball coach Brad Kreick uttered the same phrase late Sunday afternoon that he did a year ago.

“Tough kids,” he said.

But this time, the Cardinals took tough to a new level to cap off a 21-0 season.

Guertin entered the fourth quarter of yesterday’s Division I title game vs. Bedford down 10, 38-28, and it certainly didn’t look good.

But then something – or someone – happened. For the second year in a row, Brooke Paquette happened, as she scored 14 of her game-high 24 points in the fourth quarter as BG rallied for a stunning 51-45 championship win at the University of New Hampshire’s Lundholm Gym.

It’s Guertin’s eighth overall title (one shared), second in a row, and seventh in the eight years of the Kreick coaching era.

“They’re just the toughest group of kids you’d ever want to coach,” Kreick said. “And I think they showed that in the fourth quarter tonight.”

“We were fine,” Paquette said. “I knew that we had it. We’d been in situations like that before, there’s nothing new to us.”

Situations like last year the Cards were down seven with just over three minutes to play, and that’s tough act to follow. But Sunday, they were outscored in all of the first three quarters by the No. 3, 19-3 Bulldogs, and entered the final eight minutes down 38-28. In the first half, they had no answer, once again, for 6-4 Bedford junior center Lana McCarthy who finished with 15 points and 14 rebounds, or her 6-2 sophomore sidekick Kate Allard (15 points, nine rebounds).

Through the first three quarters, Bedford had 12 second chance points to zero for BG, and both teams were turning the ball over at an alarming rate (combined 33).

“She (McCarthy) is just a very, very difficult matchup and she showed that in the first half,” Kreick said. “Sometimes the other team’s just good. We were just getting flat out beat for three quarters and a minute and a half.”

So how does all that turn into a 23-7 blitzkrieg that leads to a seven state title (one shared) in the last eight years, and fourth in five final meetings with the ‘Dogs?

Even the Cardinals had a hard time coming up with the answer.

“I don’t know,” said Guertin center Meghan Stack, who was the only other Cardinal in double figures with 10 points and five rebounds. “We just said one play at a time, there’s no nine point basket. Just play one play at a time, one point at a time, keep coming, keep coming, we have nothing to lose. Like I said, just leave it all out there.”

“I think what you saw in consecutive state title games, you saw their heart,” Kreick said. “You saw their heart, their toughness, you saw their want. They just figure out a way. It’s not always pretty, but they figure out a way to have more points than the other team that they play, all but five times in their four years.”

Kreick said the coaching staff told them at halftime, after which the Cards trailed 23-14, “It couldn’t have been much worse, and you’re only down nine. You’ve been here before. You’ve just got to keep chipping away, you’ve got to figure out a way to get stops, and we’ll eventually put the ball in the basket.

“Now, with seven minutes left down 10 or 12 I wasn’t quite sure I believed that. … But we started getting stops.”

Kreick says there was one strategic move the Cards made, and it was a beauty. They moved Paquette down on the blocks inside, and brought Stack back outside. That drew McCarthy out with the BG center, and Paquette scored eight straight points before Bedford could blink, the run ending with 2 Ava Dubois Bedford free throws two minutes in.

But there was Paquette again with another layup and trip to the foul line for a traditional three-point play, bringing Guertin to within one. Stack got inside for two with 5:09 to play, and Guertin incredibly had the lead, 41-40, with 5:09 to play.

They never lost it. The closest Bedford got was 43-42 wth 2:36 to play on a McCarthy bucket, but a Catelyn Wheeler free throw and two huge free throws by Olivia Murray made it 46-42 with 39.5 ticks left. It was over.

“I have to give Mike (assistant Paquette) and Michaela (assistant Zebrak) all the credit credit for this, they said we’re going to stick Brooke down on the block five or six possessions in a row, and see if we could get good looks down there,” Kreick said. “We basically inverted Meghan and Brooke.”

“We usually go with Meghan or TB (Brooke Muller) on the post,” Paquette said. “It (their offense) wasn’t working for a little bit, so we needed to try something different.”

And it also led to BG going 13 of 17 from the line in the fourth.

“We did what we wanted to do,” Bedford coach Kevin Gibbs said. “The difference was (in the fourth), their moves to the hoop were all and-ones, as opposed to last year when there were a lot of one-and-ones. You saw the stats. They’re good foul shooters (19 of 25 overall). So instead of giving up one or two (points), we’re giving up three.

“They started using different people in the post. … We didn’t do as good a job defending the post. It was a huge difference. And we stopped playing our kind of basketball. … We rushed a lot of stuff.”

Bishop Guertin’s Meghan Stack looks for a way to the hoop vs. the defense of Bedford’s Kate Allard and Ava Dubois (2) during Sunday’s Divison I final at UNH. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

The stat sheet, Gibbs said, told the clear story.

“The numbers don’t lie,” he said. Turnovers (23, eight in final quarter) and free throws (7 of 22 overall). Every time we play them we shoot the ball better from the field, we score more buckets, more two’s, more threes, we get a better percentage. But they beat us at the line (19-7), either them making our us missing. That’s huge.”

“The last six and a half minutes, we figured out a way to get it done and hang another one on the wall,” Kreick said.

This is it for Stack, who will focus on her studies in college. How tough would it have been for this group to go out with a state title game loss?

“We won,” she said, “so it doesn’t matter.”