A conjecture inspired by a famous contest problem

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There is a famous difficult problem:

For all natural numbers $a,b$ it's true that: $\displaystyle(ab+1)|(a^2+b^2)\implies \frac{a^2+b^2}{ab+1}$ is a perfect square.

I've noticed $(a=1,\dots 100)$ that for each $a$ there's a $b$ such that $(ab+1)|(a^2+b^2)$ and my question is if this can be proved generally? Induction seems to lead nowhere.

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The first guaranteed value is $$ b = a^3 $$ which gives $$ \frac{a^2 + b^2}{ab+1} = \frac{a^2 + a^6}{a^4 + 1} = a^2 $$