You want a finish – a few of them – that is not only final, but fun?

Then you needed to be at the University of New Hampshire on Sunday.

The New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association and the teams that competed in the first three of four Division I and II boys and girls baskeball finals at the University of New Hampshire’s Lundholm Gym on Sunday all hit it out of the park.

While Hanover routed Bow to by 30 to win the Division II girls title – that was expected – the Division I boys (Trinity over Goffstown), Division II boys (Souhegan over ConVal) and Division I girls (Bishop Guertin over Bedford) were all decided by two points, one in overtime.

When’s the last time that happened? In 2015, Londonderry edged arch rival Pinkerton 47-46 to win the Divsion I title, while Bishop Brady edged Portsmouth, 58-56, for the Division II title.

As for girls, the Division I finals usually always seem closer. Of course, BG and Bedford help it that way.

And what helped Sunday with the two local games was the fact they were rivals. ConVal and Souhegan always go at it, and Sabers coach Peter Pierce once coached the Cougars.

BG-Bedford? Say no more. As Bulldogs coach Kevin Gibbs said, “Honestly, you’ve got two champions. We play them five times, one team would win three, the other one would win two. There’s no 5-0.”

The performance put on in the final two minutes by the Cardinals, especially junior guard Brooke Paquette, was memorable. Paquette willed the Cardinals to victory, pure and simple.

She’s motivated by one thing – winning. There was no way she was going to allow herself and her teammates the feeling the same thing they felt last year when they lost to the Bulldogs in the 2021 finals.

“We had to keep in our minds anything could happen,” Paquette said.

This was a memorable chapter of what is an incredible rivalry, appreciated by all. We probably knew it would be. Guertin, down seven late, chipped away, creating a frantic pace that helped the Bulldogs unravel. Now Bedford will have that feeling to motivate it for the next 11 or 12 months.

“As I’ve said to you guys on a million occasions, it’s a 32-minute game for a reason,” Cards coach Brad Kreick said, enjoying his fifth outright title in his seven years as head coach, a sixth shared with Goffstown after the pandemic cancelled the semis and finals in 2020.

Souhegan and ConVal decided to make it a 36 minute game Sunday, after Austin Knight’s long buzzer-beating attempt just clanked off the back rim, sending things to overtime.

The Sabers are a great story. Pierce sat out the COVID season of 2020-21, and told by school officials he could come back this season if he wanted to. He came back for his eighth season as the head man,and says sitting out last year “was not as tough as you might think. It was real early in COVID, nobody was making decisions, and I said ‘I’m out until next year.’ And athletic director Kelli Braley told him, “It’s your program, you can come back.”

But he couldn’t have envisioned this. “A fairy tale season for this team, for the school,” he said.

And if you were in Durham on Sunday, you saw that fairy tales can come true as good, exciting, fun, memorable basketball can happen to you.

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

@Telegraph _TomK.