LEWISTON — Eric Gelinas’ shot from the top of the left circle may not have broken a pane of glass, but when the puck trickled in on Drummondville goaltender Antoine Tardif, the scant few hockey fans who ventured into the stormy night to watch the Lewiston Maineiacs face the Voltigeurs on Wednesday let out a cheer.

And it didn’t take a New Yorker to recognize it as being of the Bronx variety.

Gelinas’ shot at 7:50 of the first frame was the first Lewiston shot to reach Tardif on the night. On the other end, Drummondville had already beaten Lewison keeper Adrien Lemay three times on 15 shots and had firmly planted the seed of a 5-1 victory over the Maineiacs in front of a weather-weary crowd at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee.

“Adrien Lemay was tremendous tonight,” Maineiacs coach Don MacAdam said. “It would have been a very, very sad night if he hadn’t played the way he did. We did a poor job of net front protection on all three of those first goals. We talked about four things coming into the game, we talked about Adrien needing to play well, our defense needed to focus on net-fton protection, our wingers needed to battle hard along the walls, and our centers needed to win their faceoffs. It’s tough to say we had success in any of those areas other than with Adrien.”

Given the weather conditions, the Maineiacs announced Wednesday that any fan holding a ticket to the game who was unable to attend will receive one free flex ticket for a future game as compensation.

“The Game Is On…but please exercise sound judgement regarding whether or not to attend,” the team wrote on its Web site. “The team will gladly swap any unused tickets for this evening’s (12/9) game for a later date…”

Benoit Levesque, Alexandre Comtois, Philippe Bergeron and Jonathan Brunelle all notched goals for the Volts, who had struggled of late and had lost six of ten after rocketing out to the best start in the league. The Victoriaville Tigres this week surpassed Drummondville for the division lead.

“We were ready tonight,” Drummondville coach Mario Duhamel said. “We remembered the last time we came into this building and got a 3-0 lead, they came back on us, and we didn’t want that to happen again. We knew that big goal at the end of the first period was the difference. In that stretch of games, we weren’t playing bad, but we weren’t always playing together as a team. Tonight, we played a good team game.”

But the Volts’ stretch has still been far better than that currently besieging the Maineiacs, who have now lost 14 consecutive contests, equaling Val d’Or’s run of futility to open last season’s campaign. The 14 losses are 13 fewer than the league record of 27 set in the mid-1970s, and still eight shy of the Rimouski Oceanic’s 22 in a row in 2005-06.

Sam Finn tried to get the team charged up early in the second with a fight, trading helmet shots with Mathieu Milse at the drop of the puck. All that did was reawaken Drummonville’s offense. Marc-Antoine Desnoyers tacked on his squad’s fifth of the game at 41 seconds of the middle frame.

Etienne Brodeur snapped Tardif’s bid for a shutout at 11:06 of the second with his ninth of the season, and the Drummondville goaltender robbed Billy Lacasse less than a minute later as the Maineiacs appeared to find their footing. The scoring subsided as the teams traded shotless rushes for most of the remainder of the period.

Lemay was stellar in the third, stopping all 20 shots he saw against just three by Lewiston on Tardif as the teams skated to a scoreless final period.

Lewiston plays its final home game before the holiday break Sunday against the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles.