U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston, will soon be on his way out of the Biden administration and into a new role heading the National Hockey League players union, a source confirmed.

The NHL Players Association was rumored to be zeroing in on Walsh last week, and now it’s a done deal, as first reported by the hockey blog Daily Faceoff and confirmed to the Herald by a source familiar with the negotiations.

Walsh, a longtime union leader from Dorchester, served two terms as mayor of Boston, first elected in 2014. He left in 2021 to become his friend President Biden’s head of the Department of Labor, 14th in the line of presidential succession.

Walsh is a big Boston sports fan. Indeed, part of his personal story crosses with the Bruins — in his discussions about getting sober, he cites an instance in 1995 of getting thrown out of a B’s game in the old Boston Garden as part of a weekend bender in which he says he hit rock bottom.

The then-Laborers 223 union official from Dorchester has been sober ever since, won election to a state rep seat two years later and continued his political ascendance from there.

In 2013, by that point head of the Boston Building Trades and still a state representative, Walsh won election as mayor of Boston. He’d be re-elected in 2017.