LEWISTON — Plenty of positives, a few negatives, but an overall success.

Fans and administrators alike praised the Federal Hockey League’s first foray into Lewiston after the Brooklyn Aviators upended the Akwesasne Warriors on Thursday, the first of five games the league will play to showcase itself to the Lewiston-Auburn hockey community.

“For a Thursday night, and neither team being a true home team, I’d give it an A,” FHL Chief Administrator Phil DeFranco said. “It went very well. The way I look at it, we had about 1,300 people and they didn’t know us from Adam. We were just somebody that got picked up along the roadside like a hitchhiker, and now you found out that it’s a good-looking blond Swedish volleyball player and now you want her to live in your town so you can see her every day.”

From a monetary and entertainment standpoint, the Androscoggin Bank Colisee was all smiles, too.

“I must admit, people were having a lot of fun last night,” Colisee owner and president of Firland Management Jim Cain said. “The results were there in food and beverage sales. They were higher on the per capita spending than any Maineiacs game I’ve had here since I bought this place. That says something.”

But not everyone in the stands left their seats after the first period to line up for refreshments.

“We ran into people after the first period leaving the building, and I asked them, ‘What, are you leaving the game?'” DeFranco said. “They said, ‘No, we’re going downstairs to buy tickets for November’s game.'”

That speaks well to Cain’s bigger question of market sustainability.

“The big question is, ‘Is this OK for everybody, and for more people, and will the numbers continue to grow?'” Cain said. “Are we going to get 1,500 for the next game, and grow some more? Can we, with added corporate support and maybe some group sales get to the 2,500 mark for our December game? We don’t know the answer to that yet.”

And while most of the reaction from area hockey fans was relatively positive, DeFranco did hear the one biggest complaint from patrons at least once.

“The one negative thing I heard all night, and it was a younger fan, maybe 19 or 20 years old, who said, ‘This ain’t the Q,'” DeFranco said. “He’s right. This is the FHL. Hockey is hockey and there are different levels, but I thought it was pretty darn close to the Q.”

The Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, in which the Lewiston Maineiacs played for eight seasons, is junior-age, developmental hockey from which future NHL stars are culled. The FHL is a Single-A professional league filled with younger players with ambitions of playing at a higher level mixed with veteran players clinging to professional hockey as a career, or perhaps as a second or third job.

Facebook reaction to the game was also mixed. One longtime Maineiacs season ticket-holder called the overall experience “fun,” even if the hockey was a bit “sloppy.”

“It was hard to compare, because it’s an overall different style,” he wrote. “I think it was gritty.”

The other side of the coin manifested itself in another longtime ticket-holder.

“Sloppy play, guys looked gassed midway through each period,” the fan wrote. “We were all very spoiled with the Q level of play.”

The difficulty for Cain, as he tries to secure an anchor tenant for the 2012-13 hockey season, is deciding which brand of hockey to choose for the Colisee. He likely has the option to bring in a team from the United States’ equivalent of the QMJHL, the United States Hockey League, or the North American Hockey League (another, similar, upper-level junior organization), in addition to a potential union with the FHL.

“Ultimately, this has to be a viable business in this community to make it work,” Cain said. “You deal with affordable pricing, sponsorship dollars available, and what does the customer really want. That’s why you can’t discount the FHL for one second. It’s there and it’s real.”

DeFranco and the FHL are already looking forward to coming back in November.

“Everybody, from the three referees who have been doing games for us for a year, to the referee supervisor to the rest of us from the league, we were tickled pink,” DeFranco said. “People were nice all night long.”