ANDOVER — Winning championships never gets old at Pymatuning Valley. The Lakers have done it the same way for more than a half-decade, so why change the formula?

Pymatuning Valley (8-1, 4-0) won its sixth consecutive Northeastern Athletic Conference championship with a dominant 40-8 victory over previously-unbeaten Windham (8-1, 3-1), the lone remaining team with a chance to snap the Lakers’ NAC streak.

“We just have the mindset of winning,” senior running back/linebacker Ty Vickery said. “We worked really hard in the summer and it’s showing right now.”

Coach Neal Croston’s team was powerful in the trenches, rushing for 322 yards and averaging nearly 10 yards per play overall (455 total yards in 46 plays). The Lakers led 13-0 before taking control with a pair of touchdowns less than 45 seconds apart to end the second quarter and begin the third.

“Up front our guys have been tough all year,” Croston said. “We’ve got a little bit of size but the guys have been working hard to get strong and you could see it. We just wanted to keep pounding them and I thought we did a great job of that all night.”

Senior quarterback Ryan Croston rushed for 220 yards on 18 carries and a touchdown, while Vickery had 80 yards on 16 attempts with three scores.

“They’re a big, physical team,” Windham coach Jake Eye said. “They beat us up. In the first half we left a couple scores get away because of penalties. But that kickoff return to start the second half, it took the wind out of our sails.”

On the defensive side, Py Valley held the Bombers to 128 yards on the ground and 147 total. Sixty-three of those yards came on one play, a touchdown by Carlos Bruton, but Windham averaged less than 3 yards per play the rest of the game.

“They like to get outside so you just had to do your assignment and check for counters and reverses,” Neal Croston said. “Other than that one play [Bruton’s TD] … every so often you gotta give up one, I guess.”

The Lakers forced a punt on Windham’s opening possession, then drove 72 yards in eight plays with Ryan Croston scoring on a 38-yard run.

An interception by Jayce Fulkman, which he returned to the Bombers’ 10, set up PV’s next score, a 7-yard run by Vickery. That made it 13-0, then the Lakers went for the jugular.

Another interception, by Alex Simon, gave PV the ball at its 26 with 1:34 remaining before halftime. After Ryan Croston ran for 18 yards on second down to the Lakers’ 49, he found Jaron Nowakowski streaking down the right sideline for a 51-yard catch and score with 0:28 to go.

Coming out of halftime, Fulkman ran the second-half kickoff untouched for 82 yards to the end zone to make it 26-0.

“We have seniors leading us,” Fulkman said. “They help us, guide us [and] lead us.”

Fulkman said he was untouched on the kickoff return.

“In my head, I had to score,” he said. “I just had to. All I saw was daylight.”

Vickery added two more TDs sandwiched around Bruton’s score and the final quarter was played with a running clock.