Joe Lauzon non-committal on retirement after UFC Boston, but is Dana White deciding for him?

If you thought Joe Lauzon rolling to victory Friday night would be the perfect way for the popular lightweight to end his career, you’re not alone.

Lauzon’s swift TKO of Jonathan Pearce at UFC on ESPN 6 recalled his UFC debut in 2006, when he blitzed former champion Jens Pulver at UFC 63 in similar fashion.

Add in the fact that Lauzon is part of the fabric of the Boston sports community, and the way the E. Bridgewater, Mass., native electrified the crowd at TD Garden with his victory is a story straight out of a movie script.

Even Lauzon himself knows that putting down the gloves underneath the Celtics and Bruins championship banners and the retired numbers of legends like Larry Bird and Bobby Orr would have been a great way to go out.

“It’s a great way to end it if it’s the end, for sure,” Lauzon said at the post-fight news conference.

Lauzon didn’t announce his retirement after the victory, but nor is the 35-year-old deluding himself into believing he’ll go on another gigantic run. Rather than make a decision in the heat of the moment, he’s going to take his time and figure out whether to call it a career or fight again.

“We’ll kind of see how things go,” Lauzon said, “I’m always going to be training, whether it is cornering or helping out guys. We have a lot of guys training at my gym now … I’m in the gym all the time with them. We’ll kind of see what happens. I’m not saying this is definitely the last fight, but I’m not going to say I’m definitely gonna do it again. Tonight was a great night, but I think too many guys fall into the trap of, ‘Oh, I’m back. Here we go.’ But I’m not there. Maybe I’ll fight in six months, maybe I’ll fight in a year, maybe I’m done.”

UFC president Dana White, for his part, is all in on the “I’m done” option.

“Me and Joe Lauzon had a deal that he’d retire tonight, win, lose or draw, and he didn’t do it,” White said with a smile. “What better way to go out than tonight? He beat a real guy tonight; he beat a real tough guy that a lot of people didn’t think he was going to beat, and he made it look easy.”

But that’s for down the road. For now, Lauzon admits that while he did his best to play the role of the stoic New Englander, the evening’s emotions got to him.

“I was definitely crying a little bit,” Lauzon said. “I was trying to keep it in the best I could. I try not to get emotional and stuff. I was trying to be stoic, but I definitely was, even walking out before the fight I was looking around at all the people in the green shirts that we printed up in the gym. I was feeling it. There was so much that went into it.”