Bishop Guertin's Thomas Clancy stays with Bedford 's Cobe Rubin (2) during Tuesday night's Division I clash at Stellos Stadium. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – There’s always a little something special going on when the Bishop Guertin High School boys lacrosse team takes on Bedford.

But Tuesday evening, it might have been a little extra special, which might explain why the Cardinals were able to blow away the Bulldogs 15-2 at Stellos Stadium.

“It goes back and forth about listening to outside noise,” BG coach Brian Cameron said, “but there Instagram posts about Bedford being No. 1 and us being No. 2, and in (a poll) Pinkerton was gettng first place votes, so we wanted this to be a statement game.”

Oh that statement was made. The 7-2 Cards in-state winning streak now stands at at least 80, and this one was never really a game. BG led 5-2 after the first quarter, shutting down the Bulldogs the rest of the way. And that was even after the Cards’ arguably best player, Cam Hayden, who scored two first period goals and put BG in front to stay 3-1, left for good soon after with a recurrence of a lower leg injury.

That made the final score even more impressive. It was 10-2 at the half, basically over the way the Cards were playing, as they had outshot Bedford 36-10 and led in ground ball pickups 21-11 after the first 24 minutes. For the game, Bedford goalie Ethan Conn had 19 saves.

“For us, we were hoping to compete for four quarters and we obviously didn’t do that,” Bedford coach Steve Gaudreau said, his team now 8-2 with a six-game win streak snapped. “Hats off to them. They’re clearly an All-Star team, and have been for a while. There are certain things we needed to have happen in order for us to compete. We didn’t take care of the ball and win enough possessions. … They’re a loaded team that’s hard to guard, and they played better than us, that’s it. … Not many teams can afford their top guy have to go out. They rallied around it, hats off to them.”

“It was good, but we also could have cleaned it up a little more, we left a lot of goals on the table,” Cameron said. “It was really good, I felt it could have been a little cleaner, especially at the start.”

BG practiced the last week without Hayden, so they were used to spreading things around. Owen King led BG in points with seven (two goals, five assists), while Sean McGarry had three and three, Jack Redfern had three goals and two assists, Hudson Schmitt had a goal and two assists, Issac Stutz had two goals, Jackson Warren had a goal and Tyler McLeod had an assist. Hayden had three goals before he left the game.

“Obviously it’s a huge loss, but Jack Redfern went to attack so it was a little bit more natural than kind of being shocked by it,” Cameron said. “We’ll take our time with it, but we need him healthy for us to be at our best.”

The other story is the BG defense. The Bulldogs were held scoreless for the final 38:18, Dak Bekar getting the final Bedford goal with 2:18 left in the first, while senior leader Bennett Matthews had a goal and an assist. That’s as one sided as it gets, but was a few months perhaps in the making.

“We talked about it the last couple of months how we wanted to defend them, watching the film,” Cameron said. “Our text chats always firing pretty consistently about different things. We threw a lot of different things at them, probably about four or five different defenses., being very aggressive.”

Jonah Feliciano in goal (11 saves) was at his best in Cameron’s mind and felt McLeod “is All-American defensive player of the year the way he’s playing this year.” And he likes the job Hugh Roark did on faceoffs and also Andre Steinbrueck on defense.

“Our bench,” Cameron said, “was really good all game… I was really happy with the way we competed, the energy and physicality that we brought.”

There was some motivation for that after all.