Just two months ago, Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball coach Brad Kreick had felt his young but talented basketball team had grown up.

The Cardinals had just overcome a huge halftime deficit on the road to beat Bedford, and seemed poised to go on to glory from there.

This Guertin team makes you toss out the theory that you can’t win with sophomores, which many of their key players are. Their talent overcomes their youth in most cases, and when someone tells you “You win with seniors”, you just point to Kreick’s Krew.

Until Sunday, that is, when Bedford rolled to a 64-46 Division I title win. One senior for Bedford seized the moment, the senior you would expect to – Isabella King, arguably the state’s best player. She torched BG with five 3-pointers, each one a dagger, and sent the Cards home without a crown, shared or otherwise, for the first time in the Kreick coaching era.

A title is big motivation for a senior, especially when it’s her last shot at it.

“I went out there with everything I had,” King said. “It feels so good, beating them. That was our goal, that was our dream, and to make it come true is just amazing.”

King is six feet, but she’ll be a guard most likely when she heads to Bucknell next year. And no, she’s no relation to yours truly, although we did cover her dad, Ron King, during his heyday many moons ago as Londonderry Lancer.

“First of all, she’s one of the better shooters I’ve ever seen,” Kreick said. “She can flat out shoot. But she’s underrated in terms of how athletic she is. She’s got that long stride, so you don’t always think she’s covering ground.

“But she’s incredibly efficient in how she moves. Very unselfish kid, she shared the ball, she makes the right play. For kid that scores that well, she doesn’t force. She doesn’t force, which makes it really tough to guard her, especially when they have a big kid (6-2 freshman Lana McCarthy) in the post like that. You’ve got to worry about both of them at the same time. It makes it very difficult.”

Exactly. It’s not like the Cardinals forgot about King. She had to use screens, run around, do her best to get open. But the really elite players do that. Guertin gave her barely an inch, but she took that mile.

“Their defense was great,” King said. “It was all over me. I tried to get open shots, it all came to me, which is good.”

Sometimes teams get lost in the flow of a game and forget about their best player. That happened in a regular season game we saw a year ago when Bedford lost to Merrimack after King had dominated the thing for three periods and then barely touched in in the fourth.

But as a senior, you knew that wasn’t going to happen on Sunday. She’s an All-Stater and her coach, Kevin Gibbs, alluded to more honors coming her way (likely Miss New Hampshire Basketball, or even more).

“The best player in the state,” Gibbs said. “One of the best players to come out of the state of New Hampshire. She can score from three levels. She has worked at becoming a defensive stalwart, she can run the point, she plays off the ball, she defends anyone from the one to the four.

“And basically, when she throws that shot up … she’s got Steph Curry range.”

And the key is, she used all those talents in the most important game of her high school career.

“Exactly,” Gibbs said. “She did not get hyped up at all.”

It was just the opposite. King was motivated from that January loss.

“We knew that was the goal, we wanted to get back at them,” King said of the Cards. “That win, we should have had earlier in the season. We came out here tonight when it mattered.”

Conversely, the Cards were, as Kreick said, “A little apprehensive early. Not really attacking the rim. Problem was, everytime we’d score, they’d come down and score again.”

No apprehension for King.

“I wasn’t nervous at all,” King said. “I’ve been in big situations before, and it’s just another game.”

Except it really wasn’t.

“I knew I wanted it more than anything,” she said.

And she got it, something that the Cardinals simply have to accept.

“She was fantastic,” Kreick said. “Senior. Very seasoned kid. Very talented. Poised. Everything you’d expect in a great basketball player. She was outstanding today, and we had a heckuva time stopping her.”

The senior played like a senior. The sophomores were sophomores.

They won’t be sophomores next year. And they won’t have to worry about Isabella King, either.

Tom King can be reached at tking@nashuatelegraph.com, or on twitter @Telegraph _TomK.

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