Paquette's steady shooting at the line helps Bishop Guertin girls basketball beat Bedford (video)

NASHUA - Brooke Paquette just kept doing the same thing over and over.

Get to the free throw line, picture the ball going through the hoop, and then, make it happen - nine times in a row.

Paquette went to the line five times in the final three minutes of Friday's night season-opener for the Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball team, and after missing the first attempt, the junior made the final nine free throws.

The Cardinals scored 12 of their 14 fourth-quarter points at the line, keeping Bedford at a safe distance on the way to a 50-43 win in a rematch of last year's Division I championship game, won by the Bulldogs.

"You’ve just got to step up onto the line, visualize it going through and it’ll go through," Paquette said. "There’s definitely been games where we all have to pitch in and make our free throws, but never (like that). I knew they were trying to foul, so I had to step, be confident and make them."

Paquette finished with a game-high 22 points, going 15 for 16 at the free throw line, as Bishop Guertin (1-0) led by as many as 14 points early in the fourth quarter before Bedford (0-1) was able to cut the lead down to five points with a little more than a minute to play.

"They don’t come any tougher than Brooke," Bishop Guertin coach Brad Kreick said. "There’s no tougher kid physically, and now, she’s really grown up mentally. Bedford kept coming, they’d get it down and Brooke would take charge and we were able to hold that lead. She was the center of that hitting foul shots."

Catelyn Wheeler added eight points and Olivia Murray chipped in with seven, including two free throws of her own with 3:20 to play that made it 41-28 Bishop Guertin.

A pair of 3-pointers by Saphia Mumpini and Lyla Stein, and a pair of layups by Lana McCarthy, helped Bedford go on a 13-5 run to close the gap, but that would be as close as the Bulldogs would get.

"We’re figuring out where it’s going to come from," Bedford coach Kevin Gibbs said. "We’re young. I think this is just what we needed. Good coaching staffs, we both had good game plans. We attempted to execute. We didn’t run offense when we wanted to run offense, but we were right there at the end of the game."

McCarthy led Bedford with 12 points, but five of those came in the first two minutes and five came in the last two, as the sophomore was in foul trouble throughout the night. Emma Kasyjanski added seven points while freshman Katherine Allard scored all six of her points in the third quarter while McCarthy was on the bench.

"She got into a little foul trouble," Kreick said of McCarthy. "We you have a kid that talented, you’ve got to spend some time in the game plan for her. I thought the kids did a great job making things hard for her from start to finish.

"She got a couple of things early without a lot of resistance, but we buttoned it up pretty quickly. That kid is a great basketball player and you’re not going to hold her down for a while game. The key was make everything hard for her, and I thought we did that."

McCarthy helped Bedford take an early 5-2 lead, but Paquette tied it with a 3-pointer a little over three minutes in to start Bishop Guertin on a 14-2 run that gave the Cardinals a 16-7 advantage at the end of the first quarter.

Bishop Guertin pushed the lead up to 12 points late in the second before three straight baskets by Bedford cut the lead in half. The Cardinals went into the break up 27-16 and a basket by Wheeler to open the third made it a 13-point game.

The Bulldogs were able to cut the lead to seven, thanks to Allard's 6-0 run, but the Cardinals responded with a 7-0 run to take a 38-24 lead early in the fourth quarter.

"A lot of them were overthinking," Gibbs said. "Relax and do what we’ve asked them to do, which was defensively play with composure and jump switch and talk and help each other. Offensively, it was to make the extra pass, and we started making the extra pass. When we did that, we started making shots."

With the shots falling, Bedford was able to go on a run of its own to close the gap, but the Bulldogs were forced to foul late and Paquette took advantage.