Fourth-quarter switch helped Bishop Guertin girls basketball turn the tables on Bedford

Brooke Paquette has done a lot of different things over her four years playing for the Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball team.

In the fourth quarter of Sunday's Division I championship game against Bedford, with the Bulldogs leading by 10 points, the Cardinals needed the senior to do one more thing.

"I’ve got to give (assistant coaches) Mike (Paquette) and Michaela (Zebrak) credit for this, the only thing we did scheme-wise was we basically said we’re going to go stick Brooke down on the block five or six possessions in a row and see if we can get good looks with her," Bishop Guertin coach Brad Kreick said. "We inverted Meghan (Stack) and Brooke. Brooke was our big and Meghan was our distributor.

"I know it was a little unconventional (but) ... let’s see if we can get the ball down on the block. I think we ran the same play on five or six straight possessions and something good happened each time."

Better than the Cardinals coaches could have maybe expected. Paquette scored eight straight points to open the fourth, cutting Bedford's lead down to two in less than two minutes.

After the Bulldogs got a pair of free throws from Ava Dubois to go back up four, Paquette added a three-point play, to make it a one-point game. Stack then scored the go-ahead basket, giving Bishop Guertin (21-0) the lead for the first time with 5:09 remaining and the Cardinals would go on to win, 51-45, for their second D1 title in a row.

While the move may not have been something Bishop Guertin did often in games, it was something that Paquette had worked on in practice before.

"Me against a small guard is a mismatch, so I worked on those post skills in practice and just had to use them here," she said. "We usually go for Meghan or Brooke (Muller) on the post. It wasn’t working for a little bit so we had to try something different and we’ve been working on that, to get the ball into the post."

Bedford (19-3) tried to make the adjustment defensively as quickly as possible, but the damage was already done.

"They started posting different people," Bulldogs coach Kevin Gibbs said. "The Bishop Guertin kids did a great job playing on the post and we didn’t do as great a job defending on the post.

"It happened a couple of times and we switched Kate Allard on to her, so we took that away. Then their bigs made some nice plays. The adjustment we made was the right one. We made it as quickly as we could in real time. Hats off to (Paquette), she’s a good player."

When the Cardinals won the title a year ago, Paquette was also at the center of their comeback, as they trailed late in the fourth quarter before getting a two-point win. She scored seven points in the final two minutes, including the go-ahead 3-pointer, to help lead Bishop Guertin to the championship.

This time around, Paquette had a game-high 24 points - 12 in the fourth quarter - to go with 11 rebounds and four steals, while going 8 of 10 at the free throw line. Stack added 10 points and five boards, getting a bit of redemption after missing all of last season with a knee injury.

"This one was for Meghan more than it was any of us," Paquette said. "We beat them last year, but we didn’t have Meghan."

Kreick wanted to take Stack out before the end of the game, to give her a chance to hear support from the crowd, but with the game so close, he wasn't sure he could. Finally, with three seconds to play, he did and got a big embrace from the senior when she reached the bench.

"Being able to get Stack out of there with three seconds left, that girl was heartbroken to not be able to be on this floor last year," Kreick said. "She really dedicated herself to getting back here. She showed up in the second half. She was a boss for us and made a ton of plays for us."

For the senior class - which includes Olivia Murray, Catelyn Wheeler, Kate Daley and Molly Smith - it ends a run that started in an unpredictable way. They were freshmen in 2020, contributing to a team that was going to play Bedford in the semifinals when the winter season was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

They went into the next year as defending co-champions with Goffstown, but the seniors who led the team were gone, and as sophomores, they lost convincingly to Bedford in the final in 2021. But the Cardinals' class of 2023 more than made up for it the last two seasons.

"What you’ve now seen in consecutive state title games, you saw their heart and their toughness," Kreick said. "They just figure out a way, it’s not always pretty, but they figure out a way to have more points on the scoreboard than the other team.

"They’re just the toughest group of kids you ever want to coach, and I think they showed that in the fourth quarter."