Ducks’ Teemu Selanne still at that fun age

Teemu Selanne is back for his last season. Again. Don’t lay any bets.

Selanne laughed the laugh that turns on the lights in the Ducks’ dressing room.

He doesn’t bother to claim the season that begins Friday night at Detroit will be his final one.

“I’ve always said it’s the last season,” Selanne said. “That’s why they don’t believe me.”

At 40, the 17th-leading goal scorer in NHL history requires no reading glasses, and a scan of his brown hair and whiskers doesn’t find any gray.

“I’m a puppy,” Selanne said.

He is without a doubt the wagging tail of a Ducks team that lost its other future Hall of Famer, defenseman Scott Niedermayer, to retirement.

Niedermayer’s departure after the Ducks failed to make the playoffs left a chasm in a defense that gave up 33.4 shots a game — more than any other NHL team but Florida — even with him as the anchor.

General Manager Bob Murray applied some patches by signing veteran defensemen Toni Lydman — a Finn, as is Selanne — shot-blocker Andy Sutton and Paul Mara.

With Lydman still out after an episode of double vision, the Ducks’ opening three-game trip — if not their whole season — looks like a test of how much the goaltending of Jonas Hiller and the firepower of Selanne and young stars Bobby Ryan, Corey Perry and new captain Ryan Getzlaf can withstand.

Selanne, his spirits lifted by a fast finish last season after he overcame a run of freakish injuries, looked for reasons to come back and managed to find enough.

“When I was injured, when I broke my hand and broke my jaw, I thought, ‘For sure, I’m done now. This is too much,’” Selanne said. “But pretty much every time I was healthy, I was playing well. I was enjoying the game. Especially the last six weeks after the Olympics was so much fun. I thought, ‘I’m crazy if I don’t keep doing this.’ ”

It was fun in part because the team played well. And the team played well in part because the Ducks were chasing the last playoff spot and rallied around Selanne’s pursuit of his boyhood idol, Jari Kurri, on the NHL career goal-scoring list, passing him to finish the season with 606.

Selanne’s 27 goals in 54 games were a tantalizing total. That’s a 41-goal pace.

If he could score 40 goals at age 40, it would be an impressive feat, but not unprecedented: Gordie Howe, who played until he was 52, scored 44 goals at age 40 for Detroit in 1968-69.

“That sounds good, but I haven’t set that kind of goal for myself for a long time,” Selanne said. “The biggest thing for me is I really hope I can stay healthy. That gives you a chance to succeed.”

His body is wiry and taut now, far from the more rounded, softer-looking young man who scored 76 goals for the Winnipeg Jets in 1992-93, setting an NHL rookie record that still stands.

“The conditioning level he has attained over the last five-plus years that I’ve been here has been as strong as any player in our lineup,” Ducks Coach Randy Carlyle said. “Amazingly enough, he puts more time in [rather] than less, from year to year.”

The exhibition season is essentially meaningless, but it is a footnote that Selanne scored only one goal in four games, the overtime winner in the final game against the Kings.

“It was nice to see him score … that’s for sure,” Carlyle said. “Because scoring goals for Teemu Selanne puts him in a happy place, as he said.

“He feels good, and he builds confidence off scoring goals. He’s done that for a long period of time and you see him get his chances and his frustrations through training camp, and then finally he nets a goal. That means something. That smile, that bounce, is back.”

It always seems to return. Consider: If Selanne had retired after the Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007, he would have left 66 goals on the shelf, and counting.

His wife, Sirpa, and their four children have abandoned the guessing game about how long he will play, Selanne said.

“It’s funny, like I say, they want me to be at home every day, but they want to see me play, which is an impossible combination. But I’m so happy my boys have been able to see what I’m doing, how much it takes.

“There’s a fine line. I thought when we won the Cup, ‘This is the perfect way,’ ” Selanne said.

“But then about six, seven months later, I started missing it. Now, I have a different approach. Now I think, ‘Play as long as you enjoy the game. You know when it’s time.’

“The thing is, when you make the final, final decision, after a year, it’s impossible to come back and be yourself again.

“As long as I have a smile on my face to come here, then I know I can play. I enjoy it. It’s the right place to go.”

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