LEWISTON – By the time Biddeford had Lewiston figured out, it was over.

The Blue Devils scored three first-period goals and overcame an eight-to-one deficit in power play time and a late Biddeford charge to upend the Tigers 5-4 at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee on Monday.

“This was a big win for our momentum,” Lewiston goalie Dylan LaBonte said. “Now, people are starting to wonder, ‘Oh, where’d Lewiston come from?’ We’re back.”

Biddeford was ranked second in Western Class A in the most recent Heal Point standings.

The victory was Lewiston’s fifth in a row, and sixth in its last seven. The other game during that stretch was a 3-3 tie with St. Dom’s.

“We’re playing like a team now, playing together,” Lewiston coach Norm Gagne said. “That’s big for us. we need to play together to have a chance to win games.”

LaBonte was solid between the pipes, stopping 23 of 27 shots, many of those coming on eight Biddeford power plays.

“I think we were a little undisciplined at times,” admitted Lewiston forward Casey Poussard, “but we were able to play through those and come out ahead.”

Poussard potted three of the Blue Devils’ five goals, all from the low slot on a feed from below the goal line.

“It was the same play each time,” Poussard said. “The first one, all I had was 5-hole to shoot at, and the others, I usually go low glove on those shots.”

The Blue Devils shot out to a 3-0 lead in the first period.

Coming out of the penalty box, Robbie Leeman snuck behind the defense. He took a long lead pass from Devin McLellan at the Tigers’ blue line and slid a pass underneath the closing defensemen to Ian Doucette charging through the slot. Doucette fired a quick shot that hit Biddeford goalie Tony Dube in the shoulder and popped into the air. By the time Dube realized where the puck was, it was bouncing across the goal line.

Lewiston poured on the pressure late in the period. Poussard made it 2-0 Lewiston at 13:28 on a perfect backhand feed from Jordan Bourgoin.

The lead grew to 3-0 just 41 seconds later. Matt Letourneau took a pass in the neutral zone and sped into the Tigers’ end. He glided through the right circle and fired a wrister to the far left corner of the net. The puck squeezed through Dube’s right arm and chest protector and slithered in behind him.

“He knew it afterward,” Biddeford coach Jamie Gagnon said. “It’s one of those thing, good goalies know when they should have had a puck, and they question sometimes how it went in on them.”

As to his team’s slow start, Gagnon had no excuses.

“We didn’t show up in the first period and that killed us,” Gagnon said.

Lewiston quickly answered Biddeford’s first goal of the game at 9:10 – a Trevor Fleurant strike – to stay ahead by three on Poussard’s second of the game.

The Tigers closed to within two, though, at 12:41 of the middle frame on a perfect tic-tac-toe play on their fifth power play. Jeremy Grebin buried that chance from the lower left circle.

In the third, Lewiston again played “answer-the-goal.” Eleven seconds after Fleurant scored his second of the game to close the Tigers to within one, Poussard completed the hat trick with a one-timer from five feet.

“One thing we’ve been trying to work on all year is cycling the puck,” Gagne said. “Heck, I’ve been trying to get that in here for two years. It’s starting to work now, and the goals are starting to come.”

The Tigers made it interesting late in the third after two Lewiston players took penalties on the same play. With Dube pulled for an extra skater, Biddeford scored on its 6-on-3 chance to make it 5-4.

The Blue Devils ultimately cleared the puck after Biddeford again tried to set up inside the zone to burn off the final seconds.