By Justin Pelletier,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – The snowball of losses that had the Lewiston Maineiacs ducking for cover in recent weeks has turned into an avalanche.

Moncton got three power play goals and two more while shorthanded, running over the Maineiacs 7-2 at the Colisee on Sunday in front of a crowd of just 2,009.

The five-goal margin of defeat is the worst in three seasons at home for Lewiston, and the game marked just the second time in three seasons that an opponent has scored seven goals at the Colisee. Lewiston record losing streak is now at seven games.

“I don’t blame anybody,” said Maineiacs’ coach Clem Jodoin. “We have to blame ourselves. I am not looking for any excuses. It’s us. If we want to come out from this, it’s us.

“The solution is us, inside. It’s in that dressing room that we have to look for the solution, not by somebody else. There is no one that is by themselves. There is potential and it has to be used the proper way. If we don’t bring that synergy together, we’ll never come out of it. The synergy has to be there with everybody.”

The Maineiacs’ inability to capitalize with an extra skater in recent games, and particularly Sunday, took a new twist. Not only did Lewiston go 1-for-10 on the power play, but also allowed two Moncton shorthanded goals on two bad turnovers in the neutral zone.

“Power plays are about the first pass,” said Jodoin. “If we don’t have a good first pass, we don’t have a good power play.”

Lewiston did outshoot Moncton, but Jean-Christophe Blanchard stopped 34 of 36 shots.

“There were some moments where there was pressure,” said Moncton coach Ted Nolan. “For a young goaltender to bounce back after that first (goal), where he got stumbled up a bit, that was key. Maybe earlier in the year he would have panicked a little bit more, but he settled down, especially in the 5-on-3 in the second period.”

Jodoin admitted after the game that he and the rest of the staff feel pressure in trying to find players to put the puck in the net.

“Everything starts to snowball,” said Jodoin. “You do the little things wrong and it’s amplified by 10. We have to try to keep it as simple as possible.”

During the seven-game skid, Lewiston has scored just 16 goals, six of which came in one game against Acadie-Bathurst in a shootout loss.

Moncton started the scoring in the first when Matt Marquardt bounced a puck off Mark-Andre Daneau’s skate and past Lewiston netminder Travis Fullerton (21 saves) .

Lewiston responded 15 seconds later on a Brandon Roach blast from the top of the left circle.

“I thought it was a very good game for the first little bit,” said Nolan. “It was one of those games where the puck bounced our way a little bit. That’s a very good team over there and they’re going to get better and better. You know that.”

Three-quarters of the way through the second frame, the Maineiacs started to unravel. With the Maineiacs on the power play, Philippe Dupuis picked off a Roach pass at center ice and scored on a breakaway. Less than two minutes later, Oscars Bartulis made it 3-1 off a nifty feed from Dupuis.

“(Dupuis) has been to two Memorial Cups,” said Nolan. “He’s an overage player and he has great leadership skills, and when you add a player like that it makes everybody else better.”

Jodoin was less than satisfied, implying that the team stopped playing late in the second period.

“Yes, we lost,” said Jodoin, “but it’s the way we lost that bothers me. At the end of the second, we made a small mistake, and after that it’s sort of giving up, and that bothers me. I don’t care if they’re older, I don’t care if they are better, it’s how you are going to play.”

Moncton dominated the third period, despite having to kill off a 5-on-3 Maineiacs; advantage. Fourth-liner Matt Eagles scored at 4:35 to put Moncton up 4-1, and Brad Marchand followed at 8:45 for the Wildcats’ fifth tally.

Eagles made it two on the night with a shorthanded goal at 13:37, and Marchand registered his second at 18:04 for a 7-1 lead.

Derek Bailey picked up his own rebound in front of Blanchard and beat the Moncton backstop with 19 seconds to play to cap the scoring.