ASTORIA — Denise Dollard is packing up her things and taking one last look around her office at St. Margaret Mary Church before she heads out the door and into retirement after 28 years on the job as a secretary and director of outreach.

“I can’t believe how fast the years went,” she said.

During her time, Dollard served alongside four pastors — Msgr. Edmund Brady, Auxiliary Bishop Paul Sanchez, Msgr. Sean Ogle and Msgr. Cuong Pham. “They were all great. They let me do my work and didn’t over-manage,” she said. “I guess they figured if things were running good, why interfere?”

Dollard wasn’t looking to retire, but the announcement late last year that St. Margaret Mary was closing seemed like a good time for her to reassess her future.

St. Margaret Mary, which opened in 1964, became part of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish in 2005. But after years of declining attendance at Masses, the Diocese of Brooklyn made the decision to close the church. On Dec. 2, Bishop Robert Brennan issued a decree that the building, located at 918 27th Ave., would no longer be used for divine worship.

In the nearly three decades Dollard worked at St. Margaret Mary, she ran the food pantry, filled out government paperwork for people, steered immigrants toward agencies, answered countless phone calls from parishioners asking about Mass times, and lent troubled souls a sympathetic ear.

And, oh yes: she saved a baby’s life. That was perhaps the most memorable moment of her tenure, she said.

Dollard arrived for work one day in January 1996 and found a large Bloomingdale’s shopping bag that someone left just inside the front door. “I thought it was a bag of sheets,” she recalled. She placed the bag in the hall with other items to be sold at the church’s flea market. But the bag started to move and then suddenly squeals could be heard coming from inside. “We thought it was a cat,” she said.

It was no cat. It was a baby who had been abandoned. At the direction of Msgr. Brady, the pastor at the time, Dollard called 911 and the baby was taken to a hospital.

That baby is now a 26-year-old woman named Tamara. Raised by an adoptive mother, Tamara recently returned to St. Margaret Mary for a joyful reunion with Dollard.

“I took her over there by the statues and told her, ‘This is where I found you.’ She was probably better off. Her birth mother obviously couldn’t take care of her,” Dollard said.

Born and raised in Middle Village, Dollard worked for New York Telephone for 17 years before starting her job at St. Margaret Mary in 1994.

But despite working all those years at St. Margaret Mary, she has never been a parishioner there; she attends Mass at St. Adalbert Church in Elmhurst.

As she looks back over the years, many clients stand out.

There was the 15-year-old girl who came to St. Margaret Mary because she felt she had no place else to go. The teen was reluctant to talk at first but Dollard eventually convinced her to unburden herself. It turned out that her father was sexually abusing her and passing her along to his friends, Dollard said. “Sometimes people want to tell you what’s wrong, but they can’t. You have to pull it out of them,” she said.

Dollard alerted Msgr. Brady, who summoned police. Years later, the teen, now a grown woman, returned to the church with her husband and two children in tow to thank Dollard.

Part of the reason Dollard loved helping children and young people is that she and her husband Michael have four children — Michael, a fireman; Nora, a computer teacher; Theresa, a certified public accountant and Erin, a financial analyst — and six grandchildren. “I’ve been lucky in my life. It makes you feel for people,” she said.

Now that retirement is here, Dollard plans to spend more time with her children and their families. “I’ll have plenty to do,” she said.