It’s tough to lose a decade’s worth of games to a rival, but the Old Rochester Regional High School boys basketball team is looking to reverse that trend. The Bulldogs earned their second win in as many seasons against Wareham on Saturday night.

“They will be gunning for us in a month,” Coach Steve Carvalho said, referring to a January match-up against the Vikings.

Will Santos lead the way and scored a team high of 23 points in the Bulldogs’ 53-50 victory.

The junior forward put in one of his best performances of the year before a packed crowd on Saturday night.

After the game, Santos was hesitant to accept praise for his performance.

“As a team, we could play a lot better,” Santos said. “That [game] showed how good we are on an individual level.”

“He’s humble,” Carvalho said. “I told him, ‘You need to be a playmaker, you need to have a good game.”

Santos did acknowledge that friends and family in attendance were waiting for him to take the reins.

“A lot of people have been waiting for me to come out since my freshman year,” Santos said. Saturday’s game was the second in a doubleheader that started with a match-up between the girls’ teams from both schools.

The boys’ game started slow for the Bulldogs who couldn’t keep up with the Vikings defense early in the first quarter.

The Bulldogs and Vikings then went back-and-forth until the third quarter when Old Rochester went on an 8-2 run.

Ahead 42-34 at the start of the fourth quarter, the Bulldogs scored twice to earn their biggest lead of the game, 46-34.

The Vikings managed to close the gap in the final few minutes, but it was too little, too late.