You can’t blame Rashad Evans for thinking it might never happen.

Nearly two full years – and two knee catastrophic knee injuries – removed from a defining defeat of Chael Sonnen at UFC 167, the newly-minted 36-year-old concedes to combatting mental demons outside the octagon as he slowly got back to competing physically within it.

“When you’re dumped in a situation like I was, having two surgeries back to back and feeling like as I’m catching my rhythm and at the peak of my career, it’s very frustrating,” he said. “I’d be lying to you if I sit here and say that, you know, there wasn’t a time where I doubted the fact that I could come back.”

Still, while two right ACL blowouts prompted predictable career alarm for the Niagara Falls, N.Y. native, he now suggests the time away provided wisdom he may not have appreciated as a younger man.

“It actually forced me to really look at that situation,” he said. “As an athlete, when you are used to competing and competing at a consistent basis, your time is pretty much marked by each training camp and each fight. And before you know it, years have gone by before you really had a chance to have that perspective looking from the outside and seeing what your next step is, what’s your next move.

“When you’re inside of this sport, you tend to forget that it’s just a season of your life. And there has to be following seasons. So you have to plan and plant some seeds for the following seasons. That’s something that definitely can easily be overlooked. It’s such a whirlwind and you enjoy it so much, it’s hard to look 100 yards down the road and see exactly what’s coming up.”

Toward that end, Evans’ long-term answer remains to be seen.

For the short term, though, it comes in the form of Ryan Bader.

The Arizona-based 32-year-old is one slot ahead of Evans in the latest ranking of UFC light heavyweights, copping the No. 4 position thanks to four consecutive wins since he was halted in a single round by Glover Teixeira in September 2013.

Each of those triumphs has come since Evans was last active, and Bader was seen by many as a worthy challenger for divisional ruler Daniel Cormier.

Instead, he’ll face Evans in the final appetizer to Cormier’s Saturday night main event course with Swede Alexander Gustafsson at UFC 192 at the Toyota Center in Houston.

"I go out there -- perfect situation -- I go out there, beat Rashad," Bader said. "And [Cormier] gets through Gustafsson, and then hopefully we can meet for a title shot there and we can pick up where we left off."

Indeed, if things go according to smart-money perception, the two winners will get next.

But after having been away so long, Evans isn’t quite so insistent on looking ahead.

Get this one, he figures, and the subsequent ones will take care of themselves – including a chance for the old man to regain his old title.

“I’d be lying to sit here and say there’s no pressure at all for me to go out there and perform well. And there is,” he said. “I want to go out there and I want to show that I haven’t lost a step. I want to go out there and show that I’m still hungry to compete at the top of the weight class. But, you know it’s not for the reason to say that I want to throw my name in the hat to have a chance to fight for the belt.

“There are so many things in the background that I can add to me wanting to do well, but the more I do that the more complex that it makes it. So I just decide just to make it small. It’s about going out there and having a great performance against Ryan Bader.”