Nashua South's Josh Caruso reacts after the Panthers handed Portsmouth its first loss of the season at the Belanger Gym on Friday night. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – Signed, sealed, delivered.

A signature win. Finally.

That’s what you’d have to call Friday night’s Nashua High School South 71-56 boys basketball victory over previously unbeaten Portsmouth at the Belanger Gym, right?

“Absolutely,” South coach Nate Mazerolle, who got an intense 40-point effort from senior standout Josh Caruso. “Beat an undefeated team this late in the season. And that is a very, very good basketball team, well-coached.”

Mazerolle said last Friday’s loss to Windham was the 7-3 Panthers’ “low point”, but “two great practices, a really good win over Salem, I think that all built toward this. Signature win, without question.”

It didn’t seem like it would be, as the Panthers, up 23-15 in the second quarter, found themselves down 31-28 at the half. But South turned things around up to go up 46-41 heading into fourth quarter. But it was a 51-49 game when the Panthers went on a wild Caruso-led 15-2 run, the Clippers (9-1) going scoreless for a five minute span. Ball game.

Caruso still had floor burns, cuts and scrapes after this, but the difference was this time his team came out on top so those 40 points -xx of which came in the second half – weren’t in vain.

“It’s toughness,” Caruso said of the Panthers’ turnaround in the second half. “That’s what we take pride in every day in practice. When we do that, we stay together, and that’s how we play our best basketball.”

The Clippers fell short largely because they turned the ball over 19 times, 12 in the second half.

“It’s hard to score when you don’t even get shots off,” Portsmouth coach John Mulvey said. “We turned the ball over too much, They (South) did a good job on defense, stifled us a little bit. We played well for almost three quarters, then it got away from us.”

“It (South’s big run) came rather quick,” Mazerolle said. “It’s always nice to have Josh Caruso on your side, certainly. Josh Tripp, Daniel Karanavic (10 points) had some great plays as well.”

But as Mulvey mentioned, South’s defensive effort increased. The Panthers got big efforts from Francisco Rodriguez, Colvin Levesque and Linc Vanderhorst as the Clippers offensive flow was completely disrupted in that fourth quarter. That prevented Clippers standout Isaiah Reiss from going off especially in the third period the way he did in the first half when he had 16 of his game-high 32 points.

“We talked about a couple of things that we weren’t doing well defensively that we had focused on the last two days,” Mazerolle said. “Offensively we started to get more of a rhythm because we were actually executing the plays. When we do that, we’re pretty good. And I think that was the difference.”

Nashua South’s Josh Tripp goes up for an easy two vs. Portsmouth’s Zavier Lampert during Friday night’s game at the Belanger Gym. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

Nashua South’s Josh Tripp goes up for an easy two vs. Portsmouth’s Zavier Lampert during Friday night’s game at the Belanger Gym. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

And Caruso, who had only 10 points in the first half, was tough to stop. He had 13 of South’s 16 points during their run.

“He’s the toughest matchup in our division,” Mulvey said. “He’s tough to guard. He moves extremely well without the ball, we tried to hammer that home. … We lost him a lot late. You have to play a complete game against him. He can score six, eight, 10, 12 points extremely fast, and he did that to us tonight.”

The Panthers don’t want to stop here, but it doesn’t get any easier. They have a tough road game on Tuesday at local rival Merrimack before having to tangle with arch rival Nashua North at the Belanger next Friday night. As Mazerolle said, “It gets tougher.”

But the bottom line was this was the win the Panthers were chasing to give them a better feeling going into the season’s second half.

“We missed out on a few opportunities early,” Caruso said. “We felt like this was must win tonight for us and we went out and got it done.”