Just about everything that could have gone wrong for the Lewiston Maineiacs on Friday night in Cape Breton, did.

Get behind early? Check.

Take too many penalties? Lose captain Danick Paquette early for fighting? Get blistered in the first game of a three-games-in-three-nights trip?

Check, check and check.

Cape Breton fired off three goals in the first period and tacked on a couple more for good measure as the Screaming Eagles downed the Maineiacs 5-0 in front of 3,412 at Centre 200.

“Right now, what we have on the team, to quote Pat Riley, is a ‘disease of me,'” Maineiacs’ coach Ed Harding said. “A lot of guys out there are worrying about themselves instead of the team, and until they realize it’s about the team, we’re going to struggle.”

The Maineiacs played nearly half the game at least a man down, too, suffering through 12 penalty-kills, including five in the first period alone.

“We didn’t follow the game plan from the beginning,” Harding said. “We had a specific game plan to beat Cape Breton, and we didn’t follow it, and there were 12 PKs. We need to decide as a team which direction we want to go.”

It didn’t take long for Cape Breton to get their partisan home crowd into the game. Jeremie Gouchie pounded home a shot past Peter Delmas less than 10 minutes into the game to put the Eagles (7-1-0) on top 1-0. Chris Culligan added an unassisted tally as a Lewiston power play ended to make it 2-0 at 14:21, and Nick MacNeil added another, this one on the power play, to close out the first frame.

Michael Stinziani converted on a power play after a Denis Reul penalty early in the second, and MacNeil added a second goal in the third to round out the scoring.

Seventeen-year-old Olivier Roy improved to 6-0 on the season with the shutout, while Delmas dropped to 1-2.

The same two teams will square off Saturday night, and Lewiston will round out its road trip in Halifax on Sunday afternoon.