Things were a little too crowded in the Pinkerton goal crease, as Bishop Guertin's Will McBournie (19) found out during Monday's game at Skate 3 in Tyngsborough, Mass. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

TYNGSBOROUGH, Mass. – There’s about 12 days left in the Division I boys hockey regular season, and the way you can tell is that the Bishop Guertin Cardinals have their motor in overdrive.

The Cards appeared to skate circles around a very good Pinkerton Academy team on Monday to the tune of a 6-2 win at Skate 3 Arena. The triumph improves BG to 9-4 and gives the Cards skate up on the 8-5 Astros in the battle for a top four berth, as they now own a valuable tiebreaker.

Since they lost to top ranked Concord on a late goal back in mid-January at Everett Arena, the Cards have won six of seven, their only defeat being another one-goal loss to current No. 2 Trinity. And in that six is a revenge win over the Tide.

“Our captains are doing a good job, our coaches are doing a good job of jelling us all together,” said BG’s Gavin Santos, who led the win with hat trick and an assist, a four-point day. “We’ve had a couple of injuries and sickness is going around, but we’ve been doing a good job at practice picking each other up. It’s been good.”

What Santos & Co. did on Monday was shift into another gear, beating the Astros to the puck and the open areas on the ice with speed.

“The footspeed was the difference tonight,” BG coach Gary Bishop said. “We’ve been working on that. We know (the Astros) have four defensemen who are all big. I knew if we could beat them to the corners we could get into the corners and get out of the corners before they’d get there. And that’s pretty much what we did.”

Then they grabbed control of the game with a four-goal second period to take a 5-1 lead heading into the third. Santos got the go-ahead goal, 2-1, with a blast from just inside the blue line just 31 seconds in (Jack Stone, first of two Jordan O’Hearn assists).

Then the goals began flowing, basically breakaways by Dom Trepanier, assisted by Anthony Dobrutchi (his second feed of the game) at 6:14, and then 57 seconds later a backhander by Santos (Luke Ferrari assist) and a tick-tack-toe goal by Jack Stone, with O’Hearn getting his second assist and the other to Cam Vaillancourt at 13:08. The flow was just too much for the Astros and netminder Tanner Meedy, who actually led 1-0 early in the first on a goal by Daniel Richards (Gavin Burwell, Tyler Pinardi assists) just as a power play was expiring.

“Yeah, they’re a physical team,” Pinkerton coach Jon Chabot said. “We had a bit of a shaky stark, it was good we got the power play goal, but then they capitalized in the second period. It was tough for us to battle back.”

The Cards and Owen Murphy answered that Pinkerton goal within a minute to tie things at one assists going to Dobrutchi and Santos. Then came the second period barrage.

“I thought we did a pretty good job in the first period coming out, we just didn’t finish,” Bishop said. “Then in the second period we came out hard and got a couple of quick ones and there you go.”

The toughest challenge for BG was staying out of the penalty box, as they got four penalties to zip for the Astros. They and freshman goalie Brody Fallon (22 stops) survived a 5-on-3 for 1:37 in the latter third of the middle period, which was really the Astros’ last gasp.

“The 5-on-3 was huge that we were able to shut them down,” Bishop said. “That could have been 4-2, 4-3 really quick.”

But it never got to that. BG finished it off with an empty netter by Santos (Zach Fortier, Jack Menicci assists), nearly two minutes after the Astros had their second goal, this one by Johnny Barbarosa.

Bishop Guertin’s Dom Trepanier is about to lift the puck past Pinkerton goalie Tanner Meedy for a goal during the Cards’ 6-2 win Monday at Skate 3 in Tyngsborough, Mass. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

The bottom line is this: the Cards know their team much better than they did a month ago.

“We’re at the point now where we clearly know who the top six forwards are,” Bishop said. “We know who the top four ‘D’ are. Now we’re using these last five games to find out who the third line is.

Three and four both played quite a bit. Four is the little guys, three is all the big guys, and we’re going to play them until someone steps up and proves they belong.”

Well, the Cards keep proving they belong in the title hunt, for certain. Monday’s win was huge.

“We were tied,” Bishop said of his team and the Astros. “Now we’ve got a couple of points on them, and we’ve got Windham (9-6) next, and they’re right below us. We want to get into the No. 2-3 spot (in the standings).”

And keep that engine running.