Gina Carano meeting with Dana White next week: 'Now is the moment'

The Gina Carano-to-the-UFC talk won’t go away, but now there’s a bona fide reason for it to stay ramped up.

Carano herself drove home some legitimacy to the speculation that she may be eyeing a return to MMA when on Thursday night, she told Arsenio Hall on his latenight show that she not only is interested in fighting again – but she’s meeting with UFC President Dana White to talk about it.

Carano hasn’t fought since August 2009, when she lost a Strikeforce featherweight title fight to Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino. That was the only loss of her MMA career, and since then, she has focused her career on acting, including the lead role in the Steven Soderbergh-helmed “Haywire” and a part in “Fast & Furious 6.”

“I 100 percent (miss fighting),” Carano told Hall on the syndicated program. “There’s not a workout I go through that I’m not fighting someone in my mind. It’s never gone away.”

A month ago, rumors started flying that Carano might be ready to return – and might be the next opponent for Ronda Rousey, the UFC’s women’s bantamweight titleholder and the current “face of women’s MMA,” a proverbial title that Carano held before her.

UFC analyst Joe Rogan, on a radio show, said big news was coming, and the speculation was that Carano, Justino or Holly Holm might be soon signing with the UFC to be Rousey’s next opponent.

In London for UFC Fight Night 37, White told MMAjunkie that he didn’t know where the Carano talk came from, since Rogan never mentioned her name.

But he did drop one potentially important clue when he said Carano still had four fights left on her original Strikeforce deal, which became a UFC deal after the merger of the two promotions and Strikeforce was shuttered.

And he said if Carano was ready to return, she would have a home in the octagon.

“She is under contract with us, but I have no plans right now,” White said. “(But) if she wanted to fight in the UFC, of course. If Gina Carano wanted to fight in the UFC, we would definitely do it.”

The 31-year-old Carano on Thursday said she’ll meet with the UFC boss next week to talk things over – but that if she couldn’t make something work soon, then it might be a last-opportunity proposition.

“I’m actually sitting down with (White) next week,” she said. “I love (fighting). It’s something I can do that makes everything else disappear. I dream about it. I just didn’t know if I was ever going to get an opportunity to make a comeback.

“So I’m either going to do it now, or I’m going to retire and say, ‘OK, I’m never going to do it.’ So now is the moment, I feel.”

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.