Garth Brooks delivered a medley of his hits on Sunday’s 43rd annual Academy of Country Music Awards, which might be the last time we see him perform in some time.

But in all likelihood, he will be back on tour at some point in the future. Garth retired from the road in 2000 to devote himself to parenting his three daughters in Oklahoma, and he’s said repeatedly that he would not tour again until they were all raised. He did do a few shows over the last six months, including nine dates in Kansas City in November and five concerts in a two-day period in Los Angeles during January. Garth concluded his last full-fledged tour in 1998, and when he first retired, he had fears that he might not take the stage with his band again. But after the recent shows, he had a sense that a return to the road is inevitable.

"[Back then] you wondered, ‘Will I see the guys again?’ and all this stuff," Garth told the Associated Press. "So it was a lot more dramatic. This one, we saw the guys, and it was like we’d never taken the 10 years off. That was good for me, and it was that way with the crowd, too. So this time, when I walked away, I felt, ‘You know what? We’ll be back.’ And, good Lord willing, we will. It’ll be fun."

In the meantime, Garth has no regrets about the decision he made to back away from touring.

"The most surprising thing is it’s 10 times cooler than what you walked away from," he said. "I really thought it was going to be the other way around. I really thought, ‘What the hell am I going to do, and what’s going to feed me?’ And I got to tell you, watching those kids, watching the tumblers click, watching them grow up — not in years, but inside — nothing better than that."