These are good times for Brian Hartline. His best NFL season is over and the timing was perfect because it came in the final year of his contract. So now all that awaits the Dolphins receiver is good news, financial security and the beginning of his career’s most important phase.

Maybe that’s the reason Hartline arrived at lunch one afternoon last week with a big smile on his face and seemingly no worries on his mind.

He rode a slick Yamaha R-1 motorcycle to the Las Olas Boulevard eatery where we met a short distance from his condo. In a few hours, he would be off on a Colorado ski vacation with some buddies.

No, he’s wasn’t going to ski, but he was definitely planning to go snowboarding.

“I’m not worried,” he said. “I’ve done it my whole life. My parents told me to be smart. Trust me, I’m not going to be aggressive. I don’t ride the bike during the season. I don’t jump out of planes or anything. Everything will be all right.”

Hartline is done with the worrying because he was doing lots of it the past six months when he wasn’t busy catching a career-high 74 passes for 1,083 yards.

He worried about making the team in training camp because he was injured. He worried about performing well during the season to earn a new contract. He worried whether the Dolphins really wanted him because the extension they offered at midseason was practically insulting.

“That sense of uncertainty could drive you crazy,” Hartline said.

And that burden seemingly weighed more when people simply didn’t allow Hartline to forget about what was at stake every time he played.

“It’s very rare when you don’t get asked about it a couple of times a week,” he said. “Somebody always brings it up — either somebody new I meet or maybe my mom asking if anything’s been brought up by the team. She’s just curious. She asks, ‘Anything new?’ And I had to tell her, ‘No.’

“I can totally see how guys can ruin their contract years. It’s a weight to carry.”

The Dolphins did only one contract extension during the 2012 season, a modest deal for backup Jason Trusnik. But they did include Hartline among the handful of players to whom they offered extensions.

How’d that go?

“It was, I would say, something I would have thought about last year,” Hartline said of Miami’s offer. “Midway through this year, where my situation was at, it just didn’t match up. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world but it was outdated, I would say.”

He’s being kind. Hartline actually was initially upset with the offer and had to be talked off a proverbial ledge by agent Drew Rosenhaus.

“I’m thinking, ‘How am I expected to respond to this?’ ” Hartline admitted. “But we decided to look on the bright side. I looked at it from the Dolphins’ viewpoint, which was they want to start talking, which is always good.”

The talk went nowhere. Rosenhaus did not respond to Miami’s offer. And no conversations have taken place in the week since the season ended, either.

But Hartline is one of the free agents the Dolphins must try to re-sign, because they need to add wide receiver talent rather than spend a second consecutive season subtracting from it.

So Hartline expects the Dolphins will sign him before free agency begins in March.