Win or lose, Dustin Poirier is set to retire on July 19th when he fights Max Holloway at UFC 318 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Max Holloway? He’s still got a lot of desire left to keep competing.

Both men entered the UFC around the same time and have nearly identical 22-8 records (Dustin has a No Contest from 2017 that ruins the symmetry). But Poirier is three years older and at a place where he just wants to spend time with his family. Holloway thinks he could be close to retirement around that same age, but expects the competition to push him out the door.

“My fighting career is going to go as long as I can still compete with the top echelon,” he said on the Taisei Discovers podcast. “If I get to the point where I’m not competing with the top guys, and it barely looks like I’m hanging in there with guys who aren’t top and like mid? Then it’s like ‘Bro you need to go.’”

“So it could be for anywhere, as long as I can keep my body healthy,” Holloway added. “Ideally, maybe, I would think I’d have like two more years, so maybe like four fights, maybe five fights. Two to three more years? But we’ll see what happens. Anything can change.”

Big retirement fights like Poirier’s are always a good reminder to appreciate your legends while they’re around, and really appreciate them when they’re fighting at their peak. Holloway has stuck around at the top for so long, it’d be easy to forget that one day in the relatively near future, he could be gone.

Two to three more years of “Blessed” fights would be amazing. But as he said, that could easily change should he get knocked out again by someone of a lesser caliber to Ilia Topuria. Justin Gaethje recently said that if someone KOs him the way Holloway KO’d him at UFC 300, that’d be it for his career. So we really have to value each tough fight these guys take, because the ideal best case scenario for retirement is rarely how things go.