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FAIRBANKS — The Fairbanks Ice Dogs let two one-goal leads slip away, rallied from a two-goal deficit and finally lost in a shootout to the Kenai River Brown Bears in a late Saturday night North American Hockey League game in Soldotna.

After posting a 9-1 win over the Brown Bears on Friday night, the Ice Dogs came up on the short end of a 6-5 score Saturday.

“We played hard for the last 20 minutes or so, but it wasn’t enough,” Ice Dogs coach Josh Hauge said in a telephone interview shortly after the loss that dropped the Ice Dogs to 2-3-1 on the season.

“The first two periods, we thought it would be easy, and you can’t do that against anyone in this league,” Hauge said.

Ice Dogs captain Andrew McCabe had another stellar performance, picking up two goals and two assists in the contest.

“He tried to lead by example, but couldn’t get the rest of the guys to go along with him,” Hauge said.

The first-year Ice Dogs coach also lauded the defensive effort of Kyle Lonetto.

“He really worked hard on defense, but other than that I’m not happy with too many of the rest of the guys,” Hauge said.

The Ice Dogs led 2-1 after the first period and 3-2 at the 8:27 mark of the second, but Kenai River scored three straight goals to pull ahead 5-3 going into the final 20 minutes of regulation.

The Ice Dogs pulled to within a goal at 11:02 of the third when Jared Larson scored his second goal of the game. The power-play tally was set up by Drew Darwitz and Austin Block, who had three assists on the night.

McCabe tied the score with 53 seconds left in regulation on a well-executed face-off play. Block and Steve Zierke assisted on the game-tying goal.

After a scoreless 5-minute overtime period, the game went into a five-player shootout.

Kenai River goalie Nick Dries stopped the first four Ice Dogs shots, while his teammates Kevin Wentland and Kyle Clay scored on Ice Dogs goalie Phil Cook to secure Kenai River’s victory.

Joe Phillipi started in net for the Ice Dogs and stopped 32 of 37 shots that came his way. He was replaced at the 12:53 mark of the second period after Kenai River scored three goals in a span of 3 minutes and 30 seconds to take a 5-3 lead.

Cook stopped all 10 shots he faced in regulation and overtime, but couldn’t keep that up during the shootout.

The Ice Dogs had 46 shots on goal and went 3-for-7 on the power play. Kenai River was 2-for-8 with a man advantage.

The Ice Dogs will play their home opener against the Topeka RoadRunners at 7 p.m. Friday at the Big Dipper Ice Arena.