ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Goaltender Andrew Volkening would like to thank his Air Force teammates for making his life easy this weekend.

The Falcons kept the opposition’s shots to the outside, and Volkening did his part to keep the pucks out of the net.

Volkening has backstopped Air Force to three consecutive Atlantic Hockey tournament championships, and the story keeps getting better and better. The first time, back in 2007, he was the freshman whom coach Frank Serratore unexpectedly pulled off the bench to beat service academy rival Army in the final, leading the Falcons to their first NCAA tourney berth.

A year later, Volkening made a game-saving stop in the closing seconds of regulation and was perfect in 21 minutes of extra time as Air Force nipped Mercyhurst, 5-4, in perhaps the greatest Atlantic Hockey game of all time.

Just about the only thing left was to play the perfect game, and Volkening did it not once, but twice. On Friday, he made 26 saves as Air Force beat Bentley, 3-0, in the semifinals. In Saturday’s final, Volkening stood tall against the top offense in the nation, making 25 stops in a 2-0 victory over Mercyhurst.

“It’s gone well the last couple of years,” Volkening said.

In the post-game awards ceremony, Air Force classmate Matt Fairchild accepted the tourney’s most valuable player award, immediately skated over to Volkening, and handed it to him.

“I thought it should have gone to Volks,” Fairchild said. “I mean, two shutouts this weekend. He played best, hands down.”

“It was an incredible performance that Volks put on for our team,” said senior defenseman Greg Flynn. “When you have a goalie like that behind you, it makes it easy for you to do your job. … That’s what you need to win championships, and that’s what we’ve had for the last three years.”

As usual, the understated Volkening deflected praise to his teammates and deservedly so. Air Force did a wonderful job of slowing Mercyhurst’s vaunted offense. The Falcons kept the Laker threats to the outside and rarely allowed anything close to an odd-man or complete breakaway.

“The guys were great backchecking,” Volkening said. “I can’t think of any tough chances that we gave up.”

Atlantic Hockey is still a young league, with only six seasons in existence (or 11 seasons, if you count the five Metro Atlantic campaigns that preceded it), and Volkening is sure to leave his mark as one of the conference’s great playoff performers. Saturday’s ho-hum victory improved Volkening’s league playoff mark to 9-1, including all five games he’s started at Blue Cross Arena. Going back to last Sunday’s quarterfinal clincher against Sacred Heart, Volkening has a shutout stretch of 158 minutes, eight seconds.

His post-season goals against this season is 1.62, the sixth-best mark among netminders who have appeared in at least three playoff games.

THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING OFFENSE

Mercyhurst needed three minutes of overtime Friday to beat Rochester Institute of Technology and earn a title-game rematch with Air Force. Afterward, Steve Cameron, Mercyhurst’s 50-point scorer, insisted the Lakers would be ready to play and eager to make good for last year’s double-overtime setback.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The Lakers yielded a goal to Air Force’s Jacques Lamoureux just 3:02 into the contest and struggled mightily to find the equalizer that would never come in a 2-0 setback.

“There was no question we didn’t have great energy or great emotion,” said Mercyhurst coach Rick Gotkin. “We saw little spurts of it, and it’s a hard thing to measure, for sure. Maybe (the overtime game) took a lot out of us. Our energy and emotion and body language was way different than it was last night and it clearly wasn’t good enough.”

Mercyhurst entered the game as the top-rated offense in the nation at 3.97 goals per game. The Lakers, who had scored 50 goals in the past 10 games, were held off the score sheet for only the second time this season — Alaska blanked Mercyhurst 5-0 on Oct. 17 in the Alaska Gold Rush tournament.

Air Force coach Frank Serratore said it was okay for his team to go up-and-down the ice with Mercyhurst but only within the framework of the Falcons’ game plan.

“You don’t want to trade opportunities with them,” he said. “I told (my guys), ‘They will take chances.’ The difference will be how many chances we give them, and we had to minimize that.”

Serratore said his team had “great accountability,” holding down the number of odd-man chances and breakaways and keeping the Lakers shooters out on the perimeter. Mercyhurst managed just four shots in the zone between the faceoff dots and goalposts over the first two periods, and four more chances in the third period. Air Force goalie Andrew Volkening said his teammates did a good job keeping the shooting lanes clear, which made it easier for him to make his 25 saves.

“They executed the game plan to perfection,” Serratore said.

The Mercyhurst players were left searching for answers to a puzzle they can never solve.

“Air Force was all over us,” said defensemen and co-captain Kirk Medernach. “As much as I wanted to win tonight, we didn’t deserve to win it as much as last year.”

“I think everybody was just as excited as the night before,” Matt Pierce said. “We couldn’t get the puck in the net. … That’s the game of hockey.”

“It wasn’t anything with our attitude or demeanor,” Pierce added. “They (Air Force) played a good game and we couldn’t match it.”

INCH’S THREE STARS OF THE NIGHT

3. Jacques Lamoureux, Air Force: The leading scorer in the nation was surely not to be denied in the game that means the most. His goal barely three minutes in set the tone for the rest of the game.

2. Matt Fairchild, Air Force: Coach Frank Serratore says he will play Fairchild in every situation because he is so well-suited for the task. It doesn’t hurt that the speedy Fairchild is quick to the puck and pretty accurate too. The insurance goal in the second period gave him three tallies and the MVP award.

1. Andrew Volkening, Air Force: I don’t care what the voters in the press box said. Volkening got my tourney MVP vote. Posting a shutout in any title game is good enough in my book. Stopping all 51 shots over the weekend and winning two final-four games by shutout is just plain record-setting.

ALL-TOURNAMENT TEAM

G – Andrew Volkening, Air Force
D – Greg Flynn, Air Force
D – Scott Mathis, Air Force
F – Cameron Burt, RIT
F – Matt Fairchild, Air Force
F – Scott Pitt, Mercyhurst

Most Valuable Player: Matt Fairchild, Air Force
 
PLUSSES AND MINUSUS

It was a wonderful gesture by MVP Matt Fairchild to skate immediately to goalie Andrew Volkening and hand him the plaque. If there was ever a time to have co-winners, this was it.
 
The announced crowd for the championship of an NCAA Division I hockey league was 827. I don’t care that the hometown RIT Tigers were ousted in the semis — the city of Rochester has had three years to get excited about this tournament, and fans in western New York haven’t responded.
 
I honestly don’t know the schedule of what’s going on at the U.S. Air Force Academy, but it would have been nice for the school to send along some cadets or a band to support the effort. It really was no secret that Air Force would advance to Rochester. Maybe they’re saving money for the NCAA hockey trip.
 
WHAT’S NEXT?

Air Force is expected to draw the No. 15 overall seed and an NCAA Tournament date with either the first or second overall seed. Speculation has the Falcons headed to the East Region in Bridgeport, Conn., with the other possibility in Grand Rapids, Mich. The past two years, Air Force has held third-period leads in the NCAA openers against Minnesota and Miami before succumbing. No matter the next foe, Air Force is playing its style of game to perfection and will be a tough out.

“I was hoping to get another crack again,” senior defenseman Greg Flynn said. “We’re going to have to play the same game we played (Saturday). That will be the test, for us to come out and execute like we did against Mercyhurst, against the number one or two team in the nation.”

“We want to be a difficult team to play against,” coach Frank Serratore said. “We want to have a chance to win that game in the third period. You are not going to win many games in the first period but you can lose them in a hurry against those big boys, those BCS boys. The way we have to play is the way we played this weekend.”