Bishop Guertin goalie Scar Casey makes one of her 37 saves while Concord's Elliana Wing (22) looks to pounce on the rebound during Saturday's season opener for the Cards at Skate 3 in Tyngsborough, Mass. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

TYNGSBOROUGH, Mass. – For the Bishop Guertin High School girls hockey team, it wasn’t worth the wait.

No, the Cardinals’ long-awaited, delayed regular season opener ended up being one to forget as they gave up five unanswered goals over the final two periods in falling to Concord, 5-2 at Skate 3 Arena.

It didn’t start out that way. The Cards got opening period goals from two defensemen, Haley Gagne and Aine Kelly to take a 2-0 lead into the second period. And that was that.

What changed?

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Guertin coach Phil DeVita said. “We took some penalties (four overall), they kind of caught up with us a bit. We just came out slow in the second period. We weren’t ready to go like we did in the first period.”

Guertin, whose opener was delayed by a couple of reschedulings due to exams, etc. in December was basically dominated by the Crimson Tide over the final 30 minutes. In fact, the Cards went over 10 minutes without a shot on goal.

“We just kind of regrouped in the lockeroom after that first period,” Tide coach Kate Billings said. “We knew we weren’t playing a good game, and we just kind of found it. It’s nice to see we could find it and dig out of the hole that we were in.”

Concord (2-2) was led by Brooke Nelson, who had two goals and an assist, and the high flying Claire Brown, who had a goal and two assists. Brown assisted, along with Elliana Wing, on the Tide’s first goal at 7:32 of the second period, and Concord’s Emelia Raimo got the equalizer 57 seconds later and the teams went into the second intermission tied at 2. But the feeling was that BG had to really bounce back if it were to stay in the contest.

And that didn’t happen. Nelson poked in a rebound of her own shot past Casey at 3:10 of the third for the go-ahead goal, 3-2, and Brown scored on the power play, assisted by Nelson, two minutes later for a 4-2 lead. Nelson scored on a breakaway at 6:42 to make it a 5-2 game.

Yikes.

“We were in our offensive zone for most of that second period,” Billings said, “And we carried into the third, got a couple and we didn’t back down.”

Both of BG’s first period goals were unassisted, coming at 4:17 and 6:08. The rest of the time the Cards were fighting a Crimson barrage while Tide goalie Kaylee Delloiacono (12 stops) could relax.

“We tried to get pucks deep and we were just battling ourselves,” DeVita said. “And we didn’t get our bearings.”

The thing that stood out was the Tide outskated the Cards. Was it rust? They had only a scrimmage here or there plus a couple of Christmas tourney games in Maine since practice began a month ago.

“I’m not exactly sure,” DeVita said. “We didn’t play like we did in the first period. We sat back and watched a bit and didn’t play our typical BG style of dumping pucks and going after pucks. … We just got caught running around in our zone a bit and it caught up with us.”

The Cards don’t have much time to recover, as they pay for those early reskeds with back-to-back games at Bishop Brady-Trinity-Bow on Monday night and then here vs. an Oyster River-Portsmouth team that DeVita feels is a true title contender.

“We just need to go back to basics, keep ourselves focused, and get us prepared to play three periods of hockey,” DeVita said.

So they can make some better memories.