Kids, you can get ready to leave that couch: CBS confirms that How I Met Your Mother will conclude with its previously announced ninth season. The network renewed the veteran sitcom in December of 2012, but managed, through a series of baits-and-switches and a few coy glimpses of figures obscured by yellow umbrellas, to avoid putting a definitive conclusion on the story for nearly a full month. No longer obscuring the news with conveniently placed doors and low camera angles, CBS states that all five core cast members—Alyson Hannigan, Neil Patrick Harris, Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, and Cobie Smulders—will return for the show’s final year, along with co-creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.
And, yes, enough with the stalling: In the ninth season, viewers will meet the mother of the children Ted Mosby has kept sequestered in his well-appointed study for the past eight years, though the answer to the show’s true greatest enigma—will Bob Saget play Future Ted, or will he be represented by Radnor in old age makeup, mouthing along to Saget’s lines?—remains up in the air.