When Cody Rhodes unofficially announced that Randy Orton was returning to WWE at Survivor Series, it felt like a big deal.

Suddenly, one of the biggest acts of the last era of WWE was going to debut under the new Paul “Triple H” Levesque era, and fans would get to see how the pairing would mesh, freed from the creative idiosyncracies of Vince McMahon.

So far, the results have been darn good, with Orton wrestling for titles on two different occasions, competing WarGames, and the Elimination Chamber, and earning some of the biggest pops of his career as a babyface alongside the likes of Kevin Owens and LA Knight at the Royal Rumble, WrestleMania 40, and WWE Backlash in Lyon, France.

Discussing how his career has progressed since returning from injury in an appearance on Adam's Apple, Orton explained how his career is still going strong midway through his 40s and how much time he thinks he still has in the squared circle.

“If you would have asked me two years ago, I would have thought I was close to the end because I had spinal fusion about a year and a half ago. That changed the game. I had been in pain through my entire 30's and was hurting. I was begging for time off when I was 35. I think Vince's [Vince McMahon] quote to me was, ‘Mother nature gets us all.' That's hard to hear when you're 35 and your back hurts, and you're busting your a** for this company. There have been some changes. Now, I think instead of pushing the guys and running their d**ks into the ground until they fall apart, there is a great atmosphere of ‘How can we make this guy last?' The beauty of it is, I'm not even there yet,” Randy Orton told Adam's Apple via Fightful.

“I feel so great after my surgery. I'm a full-time guy. I don't want to do the old Undertaker or Shawn Michaels schedule, which they needed to do, understandably, but wrestling at WrestleMania, take the summer off, maybe you see them at SummerSlam. I want to be on the road every week. I want to make all the TVs, I want to be on all the PLEs. At 44, I would love to be able to go until my 50's. Maybe I wrestle until I'm 50 and call it. That's 30 years. 30 years with the same company, on top. It feels like now is the perfect environment for me to thrive. If I do need to take a week off because I am getting up there, I get it. There have been twice since I've been back where I was like, ‘Hey Hunter, can I take a week to recover so I can be 100% for the following week?' ‘Sure, as long as you communicate that to me, no problem.' Having that in my back pocket is real peace of mind, knowing that if I need a week, they'll give it to me.”

Whoa, could fans really have six more years of Orton before he calls it a career, with huge matches against everyone from John Cena to Cody Rhodes still very much on the table heading into the future? If so, it sounds like the Triple H era is already paying massive dividends.

Randy Orton loved wrestling for fans in Lyon, France.

Elsewhere in his appearance on Adam's Apple, Randy Orton was asked about the difference between wrestling for fans Stateside and wrestling for fans at international PLEs. While Orton is proud to work for WWE fans anywhere, he does admit that the EU fans bring something special to the table.

“Do you want me to be honest? Night and day. Well, let’s just put it this way. Since 2009, I’ve had the same entrance song. No American crowd has ever sang along to my song. And they did it in France three nights in a row,” Randy Orton explained via F4W.

“S**t, we were in Bologna, Italy, and Vienna, Austria, the first two shows of the tour, and I could hear them singing there too. France, just — it was mind-blowing. But just as an example.

“But yeah, they were very happy to be there. They were on their feet the whole time. They knew all of us, all of our characters, well enough to — they knew what they wanted to expect. We gave it to them. It just made it for an amazing environment. I hope we do more PLEs over there.”

Why are European crowds so much better than their American counterparts? Is it because of their football culture? Or because getting WWE is a treat, whereas there are roughly 100 WWE shows a year in America, with even more if you count everything going on in Orlando with NXT. It's probably a mixture of both, even if American fans could totally sing Orton's song if they really wanted to, as it has been the same for what feels like forever.