After fighting their way back to tie it late in the third period, the Komets gave up a goal to Cincinnati’s Christiaan Minella on a 30-foot shot with 32 seconds left in the game and the Cyclones won 3-2 at Memorial Coliseum tonight.

Fort Wayne, the second-seeded team, now trails the Western Conference quarterfinals 2-0 to the seventh-seeded Cyclones.

Game 3 of the best-of-seven series will be Wednesday at U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, where the next three games, if necessary, will be played.

In the entire ECHL playoffs, teams are 1-9 on home ice.

Garrett Thompson had the biggest gaffe of Game 1, when he turned over the puck in his own zone to set up a Tommy Mele short-handed goal, but Thompson atoned with the first goal tonight. Skating down the left boards, Thompson fired the puck toward the net and it caromed off Mele, who was battling Alex Belzile for position, and it slipped past goaltender Brad Thiessen for a 1-0 lead at 5:46.

Both teams have thrived this season when scoring first: Fort Wayne is 27-10-2 in such games and Cincinnati is 29-8-2, including the 3-2 victory in Game 1 on Friday at the Coliseum, during which Mele, a former Fort Wayne player, had two goals.

The Cyclones got another short-handed goal 8:45, on a breakaway by Andrew Yogan, who blocked Cody Corbett’s shot from the blue line and then got an open path toward the net to tie it at 1.

Thiessen, the former Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender who was sent to Cincinnati from Lake Erie of the American Hockey League on Friday afternoon, kept it tied with the stop of 20-foot Mike Embach blast 13:41 into the second.

The Cyclones capitalized with a Zach Budish goal at 17:06, a couple of seconds after Minella hit the post and Budish did, too.

Fort Wayne didn’t have many quality scoring chances but Shawn Szydlowski’s blast from the right circle, while his team was short-handed 6 minutes into the third period, was one of them. Szydlowski had another good scoring chance at 9:15 when he skated in from the right circle and sent a wrist shot into Thiessen’s leg.

Shortly after Fort Wayne’s Trevor Cheek was stopped from point-blank range, teammate Kyle Thomas tied it at 2 with a shot from the left circle at 14:10.

Notes: Defenseman Mason Geertsen has returned from San Antonio of the AHL, where he had eight assists in 42 games, but he wasn’t in the lineup tonight. … The Komets raised $12,004 through the “Pink the Rink” weekend in which they wore special jerseys to benefit the Vera Bradley Foundation. … The referees were Kenny Anderson and Stephen Reneau. … The Wichita Thunder is not renewing the contract of coach Kevin McLelland, according to Jeffrey Lutz of The Wichita Eagle. McLelland’s Thunder lost to the Komets in the 2012 Central Hockey League finals.

jcohn@jg.net