Warning: This article contains spoilers
After nine seasons of slap-bets, high fives and countless legen-…wait for it…-dary moments, “How I Met Your Mother” fans finally got the answer to the CBS series’ titular question.
The one-hour series finale episode, “Last Forever,” on Monday night found Ted (Josh Radnor) at the Farhampton train station the night of Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Barney’s (Neil Patrick Harris) wedding — where it was revealed in the season eight premiere that he meets The Mother (Cristin Milioti).
After initially rebuffing Barney’s attempts to introduce the two at the reception (she played bass in the wedding band), Ted takes it as a sign when she shows up on the train platform, trademark yellow umbrella in hand.
He finally says hi and the two quickly realize they’ve crossed paths before (as recounted throughout the series), including that both were once owners of the yellow umbrella with the initials “T.M.” on it — short for both Ted Mosby and The Mother, who we find out is named Tracy McConnell.
“Funny how sometimes you just find things,” she says, clearly not just talking about the once-lost item.
Much of the episode flashed forward to the gang’s lives over the next five years — which, now that those lives include marriages and babies, don’t include as much time together at their favored MacLaren’s Pub.
Ted scraps his plan to move to Chicago to be with Tracy and they eventually have their two kids together and live in the house in Westchester that Ted fixed up.
It’s not all happy endings, however. Barney and Robin’s marriage is on the rocks. She’s traveling a lot for work and after three years, the two break the news to the group that they’re getting divorced.
Barney is only too quick to get back to his skirt-chasing ways, until, after completing a “perfect month” (bedding 31 girls in 31 days), No. 31 gets pregnant and Barney becomes a dad. He has a daughter and finally finds the love of his life. Robin, meanwhile, throws herself into her work as a TV anchor and largely falls out of touch with the group.
The whole gang is then reunited in 2020 for the wedding of Ted and Tracy, who are finally tying the knot after a five-year engagement. The two are shown marrying in a church and Ted talks about how their long road to the altar taught him the lesson that “I have to love this woman as much as I can for as long as I can. I carried that lesson with me … I carried it with me when she got sick.”
It’s then that he is shown reading to her in a hospital bed, and fans’ fears were realized — when Ted is telling the story to his kids in 2030, The Mother has been dead for six years.
But as a graying Ted ends the story to his kids — “And that, kids, is how I met your mother” — they’re not buying it. If the point of the series-long story was about their mother, why was she hardly in it?
“That’s not the reason you made us listen to this,” says his daughter Penny. “This is a story about how you’re totally in love with Aunt Robin,” referring to Ted’s love interest for most of the series.
And so, with his kids’ blessing to move on, “How I Met Your Mother” ended the same way it began: In a throwback to the first episode, the hopeless romantic Ted stands outside Robin’s window, a blue French horn (and his heart) in hand.