With the way the Shore Conference operates nowadays, a team’s fate sometimes could be doomed by having a successful season the year before. Take the Barnegat boys basketball team, for example.

The Bengals had a great season a year ago, one of their best in program history, which included a division championship for the first time ever. The problem: They had a team full of seniors and the one returning player left from that squad transferred to another school, leaving coach Mike Puorro scratching…