The BG girls hockey team had that championship feeling last weekend, but the Cardinals were clearly a contender all season long. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

If you’re wondering about the origins of this winter’s Bishop Guertin girls hockey Division I state championship, you need to go back a little over a year ago, to just before the pandemic began.

There was a team dinner a mere couple of hours after the Cardinals had taken state title favorite Concord to the limit, falling just short in the quarterfinals at Concord’s Everett Arena.

They knew they were very, very close.

“That night,” one of this year’s senior captains, Brooke Yabroudy, said, “all of us were like, ‘All right, we step on it for next year, we don’t look back, and we just keep moving forward. And we did.”

Yabroudy has played 12 years of hockey, and she began the year in quarantine.

“This year, our team clicked better than it ever had, and we worked harder this year than any other year.

“When I got back from quarantine and hit the ice that first day, I knew we had something special. I knew we’d go really far. I’m so happy we won.”

Once he saw what he had for a roster, Guertin coach Scott Ciszek knew he had a team that could move the puck well out of the defensive zone and score.

The Cardinals no longer needed to sit back and wait for chances here and there.

Their best defense would be their offense. The three key words all season: puck possession, pressure, and execution.

And it worked.

How did this team take it the distance? Ciszek and his staff broke things down to one period at a time, and the players were able to carry out the game plan.

“All season long they were listening and able to implement what we were asking them to do, he said.

There were just a couple of pieces the team needed. It had the nucleus of players like Yabroudy, Lindsay Hult, Julie McLaughlin, Kate Simpson, goalie Sarah King, and others. But Ciszek knew better than to make early plans after that team dinner, because with BG, the year-to-year is a bigger unknown than at other schools since players could drop in the Cards’ laps from anywhere – or also leave.

“BG isn’t like some of the other high schools,” he said. “We don’t know what’s coming in. We can’t look down into our junior high schools and see what’s coming. So we have to reassess at the beginning and see what we have.”

But when two newcomers arrived, it changed everything: freshman Grace Menicci, who became a stalwart on the defensive side, and sophomore Jenna Lynch, who was an offensive dynamo and recently named the New Hampshire Hockey Coaches Association’s Girls Player of the Year. She made a huge difference end to end.

“Oh, a great difference,” Yabroudy said. “She’s the least selfish player too, and she’s so good. She helped a lot.”

Lynch’s arrival was partly, ironically, due to the pandemic. Hailing from Brookline, she was always a student at Guertin, but played her hockey for a junior team in Massachusetts. But the protocols, etc. prevented her from playing there.

“I wasn’t allowed to go down into Mass. because we live in New Hampshire,” she said. “So BG gave me the opportunity to play for the high school and I took that opportunity.

“I’m so happy I joined, it was a great experience. I’m so happy they gave me this opportunity, and we finished it off.”

Lynch’s presence gave McLaughlin, who blossomed into a scorer a year ago, a linemate who would take that pressure off her.

“This was amazing,” McLaughlin, a junior, said. “This group was unlike what we’ve had the last two years. Just within our team, the comaraderie, and we had so much fun this season.”

Clearly, the sophomore made a difference.

“A lot,” Hult said. “I knew I could just pass it to her, and she’d get it done.”

Hult didn’t have to do as much. She’s an offensive defenseman, but she didn’t need to be all over the ice as much.

“It was nice,” she said. “I could just focus on my one position, stay calm, and keep everyone motivated.”

And that was also due to the presence of Menicci, who Ciszek called “an offensively gifted defenseman, kind of like Lindsay. So that gives us a lot of leeway, where we had two offensively gifted defensemen and two defensively gifted defensemen.”

Menicci had some good heritage, too. Her father, Tom, played on the 1987 BG boys hockey title win, which also happened to be that program’s first championship.

All the ingredients simply came together made this team different than the rest.

“I think just working together, keeping our heads up, keeping the positivity going within ourselves,” McLaughlin said. “I think that’s what just helped us believing in ourselves.

“It definitely helped the sophomores and the freshman that we had. They put in the work, and it showed.”

“We just had more depth and chemistry,” Hult said, “from front to back, all the way through the ice. We didn’t have to rely on just one line or one person. We had everyone, and we didn’t have to worry about it.”

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THE SEASON

The Cards began the year obvioulsy a month later than normal due to the pandemic related late start, but in mid-January went right back to where last season ended, Concord’s Everett Arena, to take on the team that ended their previous season, the Crimson Tide. The result was an 8-2 BG blowout.

“When we were able to beat them in the very first game, even when we didn’t have people acclimated, the practices were all over the place, and we were missing Yabroudy,” Ciszek said. “So we weren’t sure until that game. We came out and really put the pressure on outshot Concord. We knew that day we had something pretty special.”

The only unknown was injuries and other potential quarantines, and avoiding a mass shutdown. They missed a player here or there, but stormed their way to a 13-0 regular season, outscoring the opposition 97-23.

However, there were two key games, both at the team’s home this year, Hudson’s Cyclones Arena.

The first came on Feb. 10 when the Cards trailed Berlin-Gorham 6-4 after two periods, outplayed and outscored.

But the visitors never got a sniff of the offensive zone in the final 15 minutes while the Cards scored four unanswered, an impressive display.

And then, of course, came the Hanover game on Feb. 24, the final regular season game. Once again, Guertin was down entering the third period, trailing 3-1. And they were down 4-3 with Hanover on the power play with four minutes left.

Then the Marauders self-destructed, and no team could get away with that against this Guertin team. Three penalties led to four BG goals and Guertin was clearly the best on this side of the state, with unbeaten St. Thomas-Winnacunnet-Dover the best on the other side of Route 93.

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THE SEMIS

The rematch with Hanover was expected, but it was thought the two would be meeting in the finals instead. But the regional matchups were literally pulled out of a hat by the NHIAA hockey committee, and Hanover and BG’s regions (two and four) were matched. Ciszek talked a lot in the days leading up to it for the opportunity to dethrone a dynasty. Actually, that had happened a year ago, too, as Hanover was beaten in the semis. But in the coach’s mind, the Cards had a score to settle because Hanover’s streak of 10 straight state titles began with its 2-0 win over BG back in the 2010 finals, up until now the only Cardinal title game appearance.

In this one, unlike the regular season meeting, Guertin controlled the pace of play, but simply couldn’t keep Hanover out of the net. But the Cards, thanks to a Lynch second period goal, were up 4-3 for all but 30 seconds of the third period. Yes, a deflection off a skate with 30.6 seconds left sent the game into overtime and a shot that deflected off goalie King to the post and out in a frozen moment in time, in the first 25 seconds of OT almost sent Hanover to the finals instead.

As Marauders coach John Dodds said, “I had my arms in the air.”

But Kate Simpson, one of the team’s nine seniors, had other ideas and scored about five minutes later. The Cards made it to the finals.

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THE BIG DAY

When they got to the finals, the Cardinals knew they were going up against one of the state’s better goalies in Pivirotto.

The solution? If you shoot the puck, good things will happen. There would be strength in numbers.

“She’s one of those solid goalies in the league,” Yabroudy said. “We just wanted shots, shots and shots, no matter how we could get them on the net, because you never know.”

“It was a lot of pressure,” Lynch said. “We wanted to execute with pressure. Puck possession and execution. We executed, and we finished.”

Guertin had had trouble in some games in the second period, but the Cardinals solved that problem with three goals and a 4-1 lead.

“We were more thinking, if we could put a few more on, relieve the pressure on ourselves a little bit,” McLaughlin said. “Take advantage of it, a couple of the opportunities we were getting, just go out there and skate hard.”

The final was 6-1, and left some of the mainstays, like Hult, overjoyed.

“I didn’t know how to feel,” Hult said, “because we had never made it this far.”

“They came out, they were on a mission, and they accomplished it,” Ciszek said. “We have nine seniors that get to go out on this. What’s better than that for them?”

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