Brandon Belfonti said the key to Northern Lehigh's 39-33 victory over Bangor was having "a short memory."

That might have been true during the game, but the performance that allowed Belfonti and the Bulldogs to rally for the victory is another story.Because that performance is something that they will wanted to save in their memory for a long time.Northern Lehigh overcame a season's worth of bad breaks, bad plays, and double digit deficits to get its first win of the season.That wouldn't have happened without tremendous resiliency on the part of the Bulldogs and an incredible game from Belfonti, who rushed for 274 yards and three touchdowns."We just kept telling each other on the sideline that we needed to keep our heads up and not worry about the mistakes," said Belfonti. "That's exactly what everyone did."You need to have a short memory. Once a play is over - good or bad - you have to move on to the next one."During the course of the game, Northern Lehigh had to rally from two-touchdown deficits on a pair of occasions. It had to find a way to overcome five lost fumbles. And most importantly, it had to not become demoralized when Bangor returned three of those fumbles for touchdowns."A win is a win," said Northern Lehigh coach Joe Tout. "It wasn't really pretty and we have a lot of things to clean up, but I'm really happy with how our kids bounced back time and time again from mistakes that could've gotten the best of us."The heads never went down on the sideline and that's what enabled us to fight back for the win."Bangor jumped out to leads of 14-0 and 20-7 in the opening half before Northern Lehigh fought back to tie the game at halftime on short touchdown runs by Kellen Hendrix and Belfonti.Joey Schader's second fumble return for a touchdown put Bangor ahead 26-20 early in the third quarter, but the Bulldogs answered again as Belfonti scored from a yard out and Austin Hemingway raced 31 yards for TD to make it 33-26.But just when NL was looking like it was about to ice the victory, a fumbled exchange in the backfield resulted in Jake Fries racing 42 yards for score - the Slaters' third scoop and score of the game - to tie the score at 33-33 with just 3:55 remaining."It was definitely a roller-coaster ride," said Tout. "We were down, then we went through a stretch where we felt like we were riding high, then we went down again."But I'm proud of how we responded with our final drive. That was a gut check for us after their last fumble return and our kids responded."Northern Lehigh (1-2) responded by feeding the ball to Belfonti time after time as he carried six times in the eight-play, 63-yard touchdown march. His six-yard TD run with :40 to go sealed the victory."We primarily went with just a couple of plays in the second half," said Belfonti. "We were running toss and counter-trey and they really weren't adjusting to it."Our line was getting a great push. All I had to do was follow them. They were creating plenty of running room."And Belfonti was creating memories for himself and his teammates that will last for a long time.GROUND AND POUND ... Northern Lehigh rushed for 442 yards in the game, ripping off runs of 10 or more yards 17 times. Belfonti had 12 of those double-digit yardage carries.LOSING COUNT ... Bangor had so many scoop and scores that Tout actually lost track. "I was thinking they had two fumble returns for TDs before one of my assistants reminded me it was actually three," said Tout.TALLYING UP THE POINTS ... There were 11 touchdowns scored in the game and nine of them came with the Bulldog offense on the field - six of them by NL and three by Bangor.