The old saying goes, “You learn more from a loss than you do from a win,” and that’s the mindset for the Moose Jaw Warriors after losing their first game of the season on Sunday.

The Warriors dropped the battle of the unbeatens to the Swift Current Broncos on Sunday, falling 4-3 at Mosaic Place in the first meeting of the season between the two East Division rivals.

Moose Jaw had their franchise-record five-game winning steak to open the season snapped with the loss, but after the game, the team took the loss for what it was, an early season defeat.

“It was a tough battle, they’ve got a good team over there, especially that one line, but some mental errors and things we can take out of our game and we’ll have a better outcome next time,” said Warriors overage forward Tanner Jeannot after the loss.

Swift Current beat Moose Jaw in a seven-game first round playoff series last season and they kept the same game plan in the first meeting of the regular season.

The Broncos used their big defensive core to slow down the Warriors’ speed and capitalized when they received a scoring opportunity.

“We handed them four opportunities to score and they scored, they didn’t really do anything special to score the four goals against us,” said Warriors head coach Tim Hunter.  “We worked hard for our goals, went to the right areas, but there’s still some guys that didn’t play their best game tonight and we needed their best game.”

The Warriors came out of the gate strong with a solid opening 20 minutes that saw them sit tied at 1-1 after one, but the second period was rough for Moose Jaw as the Broncos clogged up the neutral zone and took away the Warriors’ transition game.

Forward Justin Almeida said they got away from their game in the second period and it cost them.

“In the first, we were hard on pucks and were getting the puck out and competing and winning those small battles and going into the third, we had a talk in the dressing room about how we can’t let them come into our building and dominate us in those small battles, so that’s something we have to fix,” he said.

With Josh Brook and Colin Paradis both out with injuries, the Warriors were forced to play four rookies in their defensive core.  The Broncos’ hard fore-check led to some turnovers that they capitalized on.

Hunter said the loss was a learning experience for that group, “We missed Colin and Josh and it would have been nice to (Chase) Hartje in there as well,” he said.

“As good as Oleg (Sosunov) has played, he’s still a rookie in this league, he’s still finding his way, it’s his first big game in this league and he had his moments out there, but we had another veteran defenceman that didn’t play very well and gave pucks away and they ended up in our net.”

The Warriors are going to take in what didn’t work in the loss and are focused on improving those areas.

“It’s early, it’s one game and all the stuff that we did right was great and we just need to fix a few things that we did wrong,” said Hunter.

Moose Jaw returns to the ice on Thursday to host the Edmonton Oil Kings and then they welcome in the Vancouver Giants on Saturday night.