MONTREAL — A little under four years have passed since the Montreal Canadiens announced on Jan. 18, 2022, that their new executive vice president of hockey operations, Jeff Gorton, who was less than two months on the job, had hired Kent Hughes to be the team’s new general manager.

Looking back on Hughes’ introductory news conference, held in the vast expanse of the floor of a socially-distanced Bell Centre, several comments from Gorton and Hughes that day stand out in retrospect. That is the day their common project began, with much of Gorton’s time and energy to that point spent working with the GM search committee owner Geoff Molson had formed to ultimately settle on hiring Hughes away from the player agency world.

However, in the wake of signing defenceman Lane Hutson to an eight-year contract worth $8.85 million a year on Monday, the announcement from Molson on Tuesday that both Gorton and Hughes had themselves signed five-year extensions could not have been more perfectly timed.

Because that Hutson contract reflects something Hughes said back on Jan. 19, 2022, and was a sign that comment was now coming to fruition.

“I had the good fortune to deal with 31 other organizations, or 32 until today, in my experience as an agent,” Hughes said that day. “So I’ve had a lens into how things are done, both from what I see but also from all the clients that we have. I spend a lot of time talking to them, not just about their game, but the organization, what they like. I’ve always been that person who was just curious about the sport of hockey and how organizations operate.

“I can tell you that I’ve had some very lengthy conversations here over the last five to seven days, not simply about my plans and how it might affect (my clients), but also what they like about an organization, what they feel they lack. I’m going to take a lot of their thoughts, we’re going to discuss them and try to create a very modern organization that players want to be a part of.”

Less than a month after saying those words, Hughes hired Martin St. Louis as the head coach.

It remains unclear whether the Canadiens’ goal of winning the Stanley Cup will be achieved. Still, it is easy to see, less than four years later, that the goal Hughes laid out that day has indeed been a success, with St. Louis playing a significant role.

Players want to be part of the Canadiens. Hutson made that clear by signing his contract when he did. Defenceman Noah Dobson made it clear when he chose to sign an extension negotiated by the Canadiens in a sign-and-trade with the New York Islanders on draft day in late June, turning down a contract offer from the Columbus Blue Jackets. Juraj Slafkovský, Cole Caufield and Kaiden Guhle also made that clear in signing their extensions under this administration.

What Gorton and Hughes have done so far is more about core-building than team-building. They added to that core first with the Dobson trade, then with the Zack Bolduc trade on July 1, drawing from an area of surplus in trading promising young defenceman Logan Mailloux to add a 22-year-old scoring winger who showed over the second half of last season that he is on an upswing.

All Bolduc has done so far this season is score in the first three games he’s played for the Canadiens, while Dobson leads the Canadiens in ice time and is the only member of the team getting regular minutes on both special teams units.

Gorton and Hughes’ contract extensions allow them to execute arguably the more difficult part: team-building.

The core is mainly in place:

• Goaltenders Sam Montembeault and Jakub Dobeš are manning the nets in Montreal while Jacob Fowler gains seasoning in the AHL.

• The defence looks promising with Hutson, Dobson and Guhle all 25 or under, with 2023 No. 5 pick David Reinbacher waiting in the wings.

• The forward core of Suzuki, Caufield and Slafkovský is locked up long term, with the next major project being to get rookie phenom Ivan Demidov and Bolduc signed to extensions in the summer.

In other words, the core-building has gone well. Team-building will largely depend on how far-reaching the environment in Montreal is, how many players around the league view the Canadiens as a desirable place to continue their careers and how many players around the league view the Canadiens as a desirable place to win.

“The reality is if you go into the open market, you’re going to have to pay,” Hughes said Monday after announcing the Hutson signing. “Our hope is that we are able to build this team as much as possible internally, but when you have a young group of players that are committed to this team, I think we owe it to them that if we believe there’s a hole in the lineup that’s needed to be filled in order to have a championship-calibre team, then we’re going to have to do that.”

The Canadiens will need to be selective in adding players that represent the finishing touches of a rebuild, but that all starts with making your team a desirable place to play. That was not necessarily the case when Gorton and Hughes arrived. It appears to be the case today.

Molson is banking on Gorton and Hughes’ ability to execute that next phase selectively, and nothing over the past four years has suggested they won’t. Have they been perfect? Of course not. The decision to trade for Kirby Dach at the 2022 draft remains a work in progress, as injuries have severely hampered his development.

The same is true of Reinbacher, who was a risky pick at No. 5 in 2023 with Matvei Michkov and Ryan Leonard still on the board. The Alex Newhook trade, drafting Filip Mešár in the first round in 2022 — not every move has been glittered in gold.

However, no management team hits a home run every time it steps up to the plate. And the reality is, this management team’s batting average is exceptionally high.

The Canadiens’ young core is locked in. They will have mountains of cap space to work with in the coming years because of how efficiently that core is locked in. And they have demonstrated an ability to draft well, execute trades that address specific needs and stick to their guns at the contract negotiation table.

The hard part starts now for Gorton and Hughes, but Molson was right to give them the runway to pull it off. They’ve earned it.

“The mandate now is to continue to … we think we have a pretty good team right now,” Molson said just prior to the home opener Tuesday. “Do we think we have the team that’s going to go all the way? We’ll see, but there’s definitely work to be done and I don’t think they’re going to stop for a second to keep building.

“But right now I would say, sitting here in front of you, we can see it coming now.”