It'll probably stay there. It is a perfectly predicted branch (it's ALWAYS false every time after the first), so it's almost literally free in the context of the game code, so it's not worth making a separate function that has to get exposed to the platform layer.
Getting rid of "if" statements is more something you think about when you're inside a loop or recursion, where you know you are going to be executing hundreds or thousands of them.
- Casey