Bedford girls basketball comes back in 4th quarter to beat Londonderry, clinch D1 top seed

BEDFORD – The anticipation for Friday night’s heavyweight battle between the undefeated Londonderry and Bedford high school girls basketball teams had grown since the preseason favorites began practice in December.

With the wait over, Londonderry was on the verge of making a statement, but defending Division I champions countered with an emphatic message of their own.

Staring down a season-high nine-point deficit in the fourth quarter, the Bulldogs capped off their 39th straight victory with a 16-0 run to complete a 60-53 victory.

“It was a real battle but I’m really proud of our team sticking to it and battling hard to get the win," Bedford senior Kate Allard said. “Our team had to lock down defensively, especially in the fourth, because our defensive stops would help translate to our offense."

Allard’s 17 points added to her school record that now rests at 1,355 in her career. She buried a 3-pointer from the top of the key to bring Bedford with 53-49 midway through the fourth.

“They gave us a punch,” Allard said. “It was just defense and knocking shots down.”

Bedford (18-0) will begin its quest for a second straight championship as the No. 1 seed in the division when it hosts a first-round game of the tournament on March 3.

“The kids maintained their composure pretty well down nine, that was the first time of the year we’ve been down that much. The kids could’ve folded but they didn’t,” Bedford coach Kevin Gibbs said. “We changed things up defensively and they struggled to figure it out.”

Bedford’s comeback continued when Eva Zink converted a steal and her older sister, Annie, buried a jumper off another turnover to tie the game at 53-53. Annie Zink also scored 17 points.

“We knew we had to bring the energy and obviously we got down in the third quarter, they hit a bunch of 3s and they’re a really good shooting team,” Annie Zink said. “We switched into a zone a little bit, we were just trying to change it up. We were running an aggressive 2-3 (zone) and just running people at the ball as hard as we could.”

Bedford’s final seven points of the night came at the free throw line to complete a 12 for 14 effort from the charity stripe in the fourth quarter.

“The fourth quarter got away from us a little bit,” Londonderry coach Jon Dougherty said. “(Bedford) has been in these high-pressure situations for years. We’re still getting used to that. In those high-pressure situations, we kind of got ahead of ourselves and lost our footing a little bit and we couldn’t gather it back.”

Londonderry (16-1) erased an eight-point deficit in the second quarter to take a 33-32 lead into halftime and outscored Bedford 15-9 in the third to take a 48-41 lead into the fourth. Gemma Murray scored a game-high 20 points for the Lancers.

The Lancers can still clinch the No. 2 seed in the D1 tournament with a win at Keene (8-9) in Tuesday’s regular-season finale.

“We lost that confidence in those last couple of minutes,” Dougherty said. “We got out of our element.”

The one thing that is for certain following Friday is that if there is a rematch between the powerhouses, it'll happen in the D1 championship game inside the University of New Hampshire’s Lundholm Gymnasium on March 15.

“We’re a team that plays all the way through,” Gibbs said. “Some teams can hang with us for two quarters and sometimes three, but we have the ability to stretch it out and finish it over four quarters.”