Trying to convey why the Lewiston Maineiacs no longer exist rivals the task of explaining what makes Charlie Sheen bat-cave crazy.

You simply cannot overstate one reason at the expense of a thousand others. Each one is equally responsible for the slow, painful, public demise of entities that many would argue held such promise.

There’s a fountain of ink on Maineiacs’ death certificate.

I’ve heard all the perceived causes of expiration. Heard most of them while the team was still breathing, actually. Some are legit. Others, as misguided as the initial premise of moving a Canadian junior hockey team here in the first place.

Economy’s in the crapper. Front office was out of touch with the community. Casual fans didn’t understand what a high level of hockey this is.

Nobody promoted the product outside Lewiston-Auburn. The tickets and the parking were expensive. That doggone newspaper didn’t send its reporter to road games. That bleeping columnist never had a kind word to say.

Management cheated on us and started romancing other cities. Excessive fights. Not enough fights. Too many weeknight games. Friday night games going head-to-head with high school football.

It all adds up to excuses.

The Quebec Major Junior Hockey League intervened last week and conducted a mercy killing of the Lewiston Maineiacs, dissolving the team because the general public didn’t care enough.

Period.

Sorry if the truth hurts. But for every person wedged into a seat at Androscoggin Bank Colisee on an average night, there were another 50 two-legged mammals within a 20-mile radius busy Keeping Up With the Kardashians, itemizing deductions, clipping toenails or drinking beer that didn’t cost $5.

The sad part is, anybody with an objective ligament in their body saw this coming in 2003. By then, it was too late for majority owner Mark Just and his partners.

Remember how tough it was to find a ticket to the Portland Sea Dogs that first year the Red Sox affiliation was announced? Or the Portland Pirates, after the Maine Mariners skipped town and the state’s largest city went a year without professional hockey? Or the Maine Red Claws’ freshman and sophomore seasons as the incubator for future Boston Celtics?

Sellouts and near-sellouts were the rule. If the new-car smell doesn’t attract that kind of following to your franchise, it’s as good as dead. And the Maineiacs played to hundreds of empty seats almost every night of their inaugural campaign.

Opening night the season after Lewiston won its only ‘Q’ championship should have been party time. Banners were hoisted. Video screens blared a highlight film designed to inflict an irregular heartbeat. Anthem singers made arm hairs stand up and salute.

And the venerable arena, no matter what “official” attendance figures say, was nearly half-empty. I was there and saw it with my own four eyes.

Apologists used the late-summer, early-autumn, Thursday night scheduling quirk as their excuse du jour.

Raise your hand if you’re detecting a pattern.

Bottom line: If you don’t have a fan base for all seasons, in all circumstances, in sickness and in health, for winning, losing and tying, you don’t have a fan base.

Just brought his team here believing it would attract an average of 3,000 spectators a night, easily. He saw a hockey town.

Really?

Sure, there’s still an active youth program, though it’s a shadow of its 20th century self. Naturally, there remains an older generation or two that lives and dies with the Bruins and Canadiens. But in the big picture, hockey in the Cities of the Androscoggin today is what hockey is everywhere else in America: A niche sport that preaches to the already converted.

The unchurched stumbled into a game every now and then, perhaps if their employer had a block of discount tickets. Not enough of them, we can safely assume, were persuaded to come back.

But it’s a funny thing about failed businesses. It never fails that someone else is willing to try peddling the same product that was the previous tenant‘s bread-and-butter.

That’s because there are always some suckers with entrepreneurial arrogance. They conclude that the people, not the location or the economy or the lack of demand, were the problem.

Already there’s chatter about another junior team from an American-based league expanding to our fair neighborhood in time for the 2012-13 season.

I wish the dreamers trying to make it happen nothing but the absolute best. Really, I do. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Lewiston Maineiacs flaunted a product that was comparable, if not identical, to Division I college and minor league hockey. Every game in the team’s history featured at least one future NHL player on the ice.

All that, and people stayed away in droves. The franchise fell flat on its face and lost money hand over fist. In an alleged hockey town.

And whether the subject is business, sports marketing enterprises or fast-living Hollywood stars, one rule of thumb forever applies.

Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].