LEWISTON – It wasn’t quite the way new Lisbon High School coaches J.P. Adams and Craig Bouchard envisioned their first season-opener.

Gorham High School, however, skated off satisfied.

Adam Tanguay notched two goals and added two assists while Brian King, Colby Keene and Peter Mathieu added three points each as the Rams cruised past Lisbon/Monmouth 9-0 in the teams’ first Class B hockey game of the season Monday night at the Central Maine Civic Center.

“There are obviously still some things we have to work on,” said Adams. “We had a few good things come out of tonight, and we found some things that we had to work on that we will at the next practice.”

Gorham meanwhile, took the opportunity to test out its third line and its power play unit.

“We still had some systems we wanted to work on,” said Gorham coach Kevin Aceto. “We hadn’t even had a chance to work on our penalty kill yet, but they played well tonight. I also wanted to give that third line a chance. The goal is to run three lines this year, and this was an opportunity to test them out, as well.”

After five minutes of back-and-forth hockey, Gorham struck for its first goal when Tanguay, last season’s leading scorer, snuck one past goaltender Justin Blouin while playing on the penalty-kill unit.

Justin Grandmaison added another at 8:58 of the period, and Alex Dahms and Mark Schmidt posted the Rams to a 4-0 lead.

“After (Blouin) gets a couple by him, he tends to get frustrated,” said Adams. “I think after the first period he settled back down a bit.”

For 12 minutes in the second, Lisbon again hung on, but Keene and Schmidt added another goal each as the second frame drew to a close to up the lead to six.

By the third period, the depleted Lisbon bench, down one player to an earlier injury and another due to team disciplinary action, started to tire. Mathieu, Tanguay and Grandmaison each added a goal to complete the scoring.

jpelletier@sunjournal.com

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