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American Hockey League president Dave Andrews was so set on retirement that he and wife Marleen sold their house in a suburb of Springfield, Mass. last year and downsized to a rental, preparing for an imminent move back to the Maritimes or south to Florida, or a little of both.

“The closer you get to the idea of leaving, it is appealing in one way, but then I thought, what will I do with myself?”

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Andrews’ answer came Thursday in the form of yet another one-year contract extension. The 67-year-old hockey lifer, already 22 seasons into his presidential tenure, is good to go through June 2018.

“I’ve been at the precipice of retirement, in sort of a self-inflicted way, for a while,” he said Friday. “I designed it so I would exit in 2015, then I moved that to ’16, moved that to ’17 and now we’ve moved it to ’18 and taken the automatic retirement component out of the mix. It’s running year to year now.

“But I think that will probably be the last one.”

If that’s the case, he will have spent 31 years in the AHL, counting his seven seasons with the Nova Scotia and then Cape Breton Oilers, Edmonton’s former farm team. The league is in far better shape for having him around through three decades.

When Andrews signed on as president in 1994, the AHL was a 15-team loop, generating $30 million US in revenues while fighting the International Hockey League for NHL affiliation agreements. Under Andrews’ canny guidance, the AHL bested its rival and absorbed six surviving IHL franchises in 2001. Today, it’s the NHL’s premier development partner, a 30-team circuit with presence on both coasts and $140 million US in revenues.