Nashua North's Robinson Rodriguez loses the handle while double teamed by Exeter's Johnny Gillis, left and Nate Tomasi during Tuesday night's game at North. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – You should always expect the unexpected at a high school game, no matter what the sport.

And there’s probably no one at Titans Gym on Tuesday night that thought they would see the Exeter Blue Hawks go on a 32-0 run, shut out the Nashua High School North boys basketball team in the second quarter, and leave with a 65-28 win.

But that’s exactly what happened.

It was an 8-4 game early with North up, and the Blue Hawks just took off. It’s likely they didn’t drive but flew home to Exeter.

“I didn’t think we would be so non-resistant on that (defensive) end,” North coach Steve Lane said. “It was evident the McNeff (Blue Hawk point guard Nate, who had 21 points) kid was just super tonight, their size really hurt us on the offensive rebounding end of it. It is what it is. One 32-0 run there’s really not much you can do to overcome that.”

North had won five in a row after its 0-3 start, two of those games in the Nashua Holiday tourney so they’re now 3-4 in Division I. The Blue Hawks improved to 5-2. But you can bet that their coach, Jeff Holmes, didn’t fully expect to see what took place either.

“Correct, especially when it was 8-8 or whatever it was,” Holmes said. “But we had a real good second quarter, and defensively we played some zone against them and they didn’t hit many shots against it in the second quarter and that was the difference.”

In fact, North didn’t hit any shots in that span, as it was 20-8 after the first quarter and that eight was still on the board after the next eight minutes, with Exeter up 37-8 at the half.

Huxley Brown had 11 and Jack Thibodeau had 10 for the Blue Hawks, while the Titans, who got into more of a flow in the third quarter, were led by Alize Roig-Cortez, who had 13 points, with four 3-pointers vs. that zone.

“It was a good win,” Holmes said. “We played pretty well on Friday, and we kept it going tonight.”

And did it without one of their key players, 6-3 senior Nik Greco, who is expected back soon.

“I thought the kids played out the game hard, we got some kids some experience, changed defenses a lot, get to see some other guys play,” Lane said. “That’s (Exeter) a good ball club. … We’ve got a lot to work on.”

It had to be hard for Lane to watch.

“We’ve got some kids that are trying to fit into some roles in some spots,” Lane said. “We’ll try to work it out on Friday (at Spaulding)…

“High school basketball. You really don’t know.”