Is this the end for Rashad Evans?

If you could forget everything about the context, and everything that happened in the seconds leading up to it, you could almost tell yourself that this was a pleasant moment for Rashad Evans.

Something about the way his body eased to the mat, eyes closed and face slack after Glover Teixeira (25-4 MMA, 8-2 UFC) landed the final knockout blow in the first round of Saturday’s UFC on FOX 19 main event at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fla. As he fell, Evans (19-5-1 MMA, 14-5-1 UFC) resembled a man who had worked hard and was now very tired, lowering himself down for a well-earned rest.

If you want to know the truth, it resembled a quiet death, the way the worst knockouts sometimes do. Stark, but temporary. A sort of preview. Then he opened his eyes, starting asking around in an attempt to piece together the events missing from his memory, and life jolted back into action.

See? He’s fine. Still alive after all. It’s only his career that’s lacking vital signs.

He’s been on the other side before. Remember back in 2008, when it was Evans who starched Chuck Liddell? The former UFC light heavyweight champ went down like he’d been unplugged. That one was less like easing into the darkness than it was like being struck down by lightning.

Not that Evans saw Liddell’s limp body being tended to in the moments immediately after. He was too busy celebrating what was, at the time, by far the biggest win of his career.

Liddell would fight two more times after that, raging against the dying of the light. He lost both and was leveraged into retirement by UFC President Dana White. He couldn’t take the punches anymore, was what it was. He also couldn’t quite get himself to accept that.

The knockouts haven’t piled up for Evans the way they did for Liddell, one after another after another, but neither have the wins. He’s 36, has fought just twice since 2013, and lost both. He’s to the point now where, no matter his answer, retirement is bound to be part of the question when he shows up at the post-fight press conference after a loss.

Evans knows that. Speaking to reporters after Saturday’s loss, he walked right up to the line without crossing over it.

“When you’re at this point right now, you’ve just got to reevaluate everything,” Evans said. “I don’t want to lose hope – I don’t want to lose heart in fighting, because it’s what I like to do. But at the end of the day, something’s got to change.”

Note that he didn’t specifically say that the something that had to change was his participation in the sport of professional MMA.

If he had – if he had tearfully called it quits right then and there, assuring us we’d seen the last of “Suga” Rashad inside the cage – we wouldn’t have believed it. Decisions made so fresh off a painful loss are like marriages made on a cruise ship: There’s a chance they could stick, but the odds are against it.

But give credit to Evans for his honesty. Some fighters his age, and some even older, construct these psychological walls around topics like retirement. They do it not so much to keep us from getting close to the idea, but to keep themselves out of that dangerous territory in their own minds.

Evans has always been a thoughtful fighter. That’s what makes him one of the sport’s best interviews, in an under-appreciated way. You ask him a question, and you get the sense that he is actually thinking about his answer rather than reaching for the nearest canned response that will get you to shut up and leave him alone.

So how can he not consider the end now? He’s as far from a title shot as he’s ever been. Staying healthy enough to fight has been a struggle these last few years. When he does fight, it’s an investment with diminishing returns. Darkness gathers.

Does that mean he should stop, now and forever? That’ll likely be the question that, in the weeks to come, he turns over and over in his mind until it’s like a smooth stone in his pocket, worn down by slow, persistent force. Then he’ll probably decide to try it again, because hey, a win here or there, and he’s right back in it.

That’s what most do. It’s what Liddell did, and then even he had to stop. It might have been a useful lesson for Evans, if he’d been paying attention. But you couldn’t blame him if he wasn’t. Back then, he had his own fighting future to consider. It stretched out in front of him as far as he could see. Who could be expected, in times like those, to think about where it would end?

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