1. A computer program product for facilitating processing within a processing environment, the computer program product comprising: a computer readable storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for execution by the processing circuit for performing a method, the method comprising: determining whether an instruction to be executed in a pipelined processor is a selected return instruction, the pipelined processor having a plurality of stages including an execute stage; based on the instruction being the selected return instruction, obtaining from a data structure a predicted return address, the predicted return address being an address of an instruction to which it is predicted that processing is to be returned; based on the instruction being the selected return instruction, predicting operating state for the instruction at the predicted return address; fetching the instruction at the predicted return address, prior to the selected return instruction reaching the execute stage; and initiating decoding of the fetched instruction based on the predicted operating state.