It sure was a Super Saturday.

The first Saturday in June returned in fine fashion with regard to the NHIAA tournaments after it disappeared a year ago thanks to the pandeic.

Yes, Super Saturday, we missed you.

It was hot, the way we remember it. It was thrilling in a lot of stops. Frustration for the losers, joy for the winners.

It wasn’t without a few wrinkles, a couple of curves thrown at us by Mother Nature. The thunderstorms that swept through the area around 5 p.m. Saturday,well, there was simply nothing super about them.

They may have caused you to miss perhaps the best game of the day – the Bishop Guertin girls lacrosse 11-9 semifinal win over Bedford at Bedford’s Bulldog Stadium.

It was superb. A team (Guertin) with tons of senior scholarship players vs. another team that has been knocking on the door. The Bulldogs had a 3-0 lead on BG in a 15-8 loss earlier in the season. They were down 9-3 in a rematch and rallied to close the final to 9-6.

So we all should have expected a game Saturday night and we got won. And then to make it even more storybook, we got fog settling in in the second half.

But the thing is, it was, as Bedford coach Christine Hodgdon said, “a high quality game.”

We just didn’t get enough of those in this sport this spring. The inequities in the sport of lacrosse at the New Hampshire high school level are another topic for another day. There are fewer and fewer competitive games during the season.

That’s why it was great to see what we saw on Saturday night. Drama with every possession. Sure, it looked like it was going to be a humdrum game when the Cards broke out to a 5-1 lead. But then Bedford came back to take a 7-5 halftime lead. The Bulldogs then went on a 20 minute scoreless drought in the second half.

It was tense. It was torrid. Up and down. Every draw control meaning a potential draw, and bringing the roar of the crowd. Remember, we hadn’t heard those roars all season – heck, all school year – with the limitations on spectators.

But this is a different time now in the pandemic. A lot of the games yours truly attended, for the most part, you wouldn’t have known there even was a pandemic. Good or bad, you decide.

But we needed Super Saturday. We needed a game like the BG-Bedford girls lacrosse game, one that added to the rivalry – a lot of it to do with the postseason – between the two schools.

Seeing the Cardinal girls run out onto the field as they survived a scare was similar to what the dominant Guertin girls hockey team did in the winter. The Cards needed an overtime win over Hanover in the semis to earn a title many thought was theirs to lose.

There wasn’t a roar of the crowd that night, not nearly as loud as the one on Saturday.

Yes, welcome back, Super Saturday. Hopefully we’ll see you again next spring.

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

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