All week, Lewiston coach Ed Harding has been preaching his stance that the Lewiston Maineiacs can hang with the league’s best.

True to form, the Maineiacs stayed with league-leading Shawinigan all night Friday.

They just didn’t win.

Maxime Legault scored his 20th goal of the season with 1:25 to play in the third, and the Cataractes survived a goal from Dominic Savoie less than 30 seconds later to hang on for a 4-3 win over Lewiston in front of 2,708 at the newly-opened Shawinigan Amphitheatre.

“They’re a good team and they have some new guys they have to integrate into their lineup,” Maineiacs’ coach Ed Harding said. “But we did, we hung in there and we played a great first period.”

Lewiston held a brief lead in the second period, and didn’t let the high-powered and recently retooled Shawinigan offense run away and hide.

Shawinigan was one of the busiest teams during the recent holiday trade period, but those new aditions didn’t push the Cats any further past Lewiston than they’d been all season.

Danick Paquette, Sam Finn and Savoie all scored for Lewiston, while Adrien lemay stopped 36 shots in the loss.

“The shot total got up there because of all of the penalty kills,” Harding said. “But he did well, stopped a lot of tough shots.”

The Maineiacs and Cataractes battled through a scoreless first period, though each squad enjoyed a pair of power plays.

Lewiston’s two power plays generated plenty of shots, all of which Girard turned aside.

“That first period, if we could bottle that up and get these kids to play like that every period, we’d be OK, and it’s up to me to get them to do that.”

Shawinigan’s two power plays turned into three as a late-period penalty to Lewiston forward Matt Bourdeau for high-sticking gave the Cats a four-minute advantage that bled into the second period. Lewiston didn’t allow a shot against in the first 2:45 of the four-minute man advantage, and began the second by killing off the rest of it.

“You have to play smarter hockey if you’re going to beat a team like Shawinigan,” Harding said.

After Lemay stunned the crowd at the new arena in Shawinigan with a diving save on a 3-on-1, Cedric Lalonde-McNicoll connected for his 30th goal of the season on a slapper from the left side. Newly-acquired Alex Grant, formerly with Saint John, kept the play alive at the point and fired the puck back into the zone, where McNicoll collected it and beat Lemay clean.

Paquette evened things up at 1-1 with a short-handed tally – the team’s league-leading 12th of the season – from in tight on Girard, and the Maineiacs regained the momentum.

Sam Finn, one of the Maineiacs’ new acquisitions, made it 2-1 in Lewiston’s favor on a quick wrister from the top of the slot, only to watch Shawinigan’s Philippe Paradis even things back up less than one minute later on a tip-in goal after a blast by Simon Lacroix.

Penalty trouble late in the second led to Shawinigan’s go-ahead goal, a Matthew Pistilli tally on a 5-on-3 power play.

Lewiston travels to Montreal on Saturday to face the Junior for the first time this season, and will finish this three-in-three road trip back in Shawinigan on Sunday afternoon.