The Cards pile on Gavin Santos after his game winning goal in the Division I semifinals on Wednesday night at Manchester's JFK Coliseum. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

MANCHESTER – Gavin Santos knew the orders he and the rest of his Bishop Guertin High School boys hockey players were given.

And he carried them out to perfection.

Santos’ goal at 13:40 of the third period gave the No. 3 Cards a hard-fought, 4-3 win over upset-minded No. 10 Hanover in Wednesday night’s Division I semifinals at JFK Coliseum.

The win puts BG in the finals for a second straight year and third time in the last four seasons, and also sets up a title game rematch of last year’s three-plus overtime classic with No 1 Concord

Santos, just inside the blue line, flipped a knuckler at the Bears goal and it found its way past Hanover goalie JoJo Drent (38 saves)6:.The message, you see, was a simple one from Cardinals coach Gary Bishop: The shot not taken has zero chance of finding the back of the net.

“Honestly, I just went to the net with the puck,” Santos, one of the top defensemen in the state, said. “Our coaches had been telling us to go to the net … I just went to the net and it went in.”

It was an emotional roller coaster, as Guertin led 2-0 after one, 2-1 after two, then gave up a 5-on-3 power play goal that tied it. The Cards thought they had it won 3-2 on Jack Stone’s goal at 10:39 of the third but Hanover’s Ryan Carroll tied it unassisted off a BG turnover just 41 seconds later to tie things at 3. Incredible.

“You don’t take anybody for granted,” Bishop said. “In the top 10 teams, anybody can beat anybody. That’s a pretty good Hanover team right there…

But we work hard. We’ve got 10 freshmen and sophomores here. We’re getting some leadership out of some of the older kids that we do have. You want to have to work for it.”

“I saw so many things in that third period that I’ve never seen,” Hanover coach Dick Dodds said, his team finishing at 10-11. “You never knew what to expect in these kind of situations, these kind of tourney games.

“After the first period, everybody was thinking this was another 6-zip running time game. Our boys regrouped and came back hard in the second, and hard in the third.”

Indeed, Guertin was dominating for most of the first two periods. BG got a Jack Menicci goal, assisted by Cam Vaillancourt at 7:23 of the first, a period in which BG outshot the Bears 15-4. They got another 1:53 into the second by Anthony Dobrutchi (Owen Murphy assist) for a 2-0 lead that probably felt more like 4-0.

But then a big Bears hit late in the second helped bring the Bears to life, and the player the Cards feared the most, Hanover’s Ronan Przydzielski scored with 6.4 ticks left in the second, beating BG netminder Nicco Scaparotti (19 saves).

“Huge,” Dodds said. “That got our team involved, got the fans back in the game a little bit.”

Bishop felt it never should have come to that.

“I’m thinking we should have scored three more in the second,” Bishop said. “We fanned on about four shots in the slot. We should have put the game away in the second, and we didn’t.”

Bishop Guertin goalie Nico Scaparotti makes a save on Hanover’s Rex Chanyi (12) in the third period of Wednesday night’s Diision I semifinal in Manchester. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

BG then got into penalty trouble when Tyler Tesak got hit with a five minute boarding major at 2:34 of the third, but then three minutes later Vaillancourt was called for a high stick. Hanover didn’t waste the 5-on-3 as Jake Rotchford tied things at 2, assisted by Sid Makofsky at 6:08.

Climb on that roller coaster. BG likely thought it had the game one when Stone converted a cross-ice pass from Vaillancourt, with Jordan O’Hearn also getting an assist.

Then came Da Bears goal with Carroll’s shot finding the upper left corner, shocking the Cards. But they recovered in time.

“You just have to say ‘Hey, get over it,'” Bishop said. “We made a mistake, we made a bad turnover, and they get a third line kid who gets a goal. … That was a bad mistake by our guys.”

And now a rubber game with the Tide, with whom they split a pair during the regular season.

“Definitely nerve-wracking, they tied it up, but I had faith in our team,” Santos said. “Our team’s been jelling together really nice and I knew we were going to pull this out.”

CONCORD CRUISES

In the earlier semi, No. 1 Concord (19-1) won in a cakewalk, leading 3-0 after one period and 6-0 after two over No. 4 Windham (12-8).

Tyler Morin had a hat trick and Nolan Walsh had four assists. The Tide had two shorthanded goals on the same Jags power play late in the second to put the game away.