How I Met Your Mother Season Finale, How many times can viewers of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ be like Charlie Brown?

We keep running up to that football, with promises that it’s going to be there for us to kick it to the moon. But then Carter Bays and Craig Thomas make like Lucy and yank it away from us once again, letting us fall flat on our asses in shame.

That’s how I felt at the end of tonight’s sixth season finale. It’s not that I really care about who The One is that Ted has been telling his kids about for so damned long. I just feel that sometimes Bays and Thomas tell us that there are big things coming at the end of each season to make us think that the endings are more surprising, or more definitive, than they really are.

Which is a bit of a pity, because tonight’s finale was a pretty funny episode, one of the better ones of the season, especially because Marshall thought he might explode into vomitous convulsions for the entire episode.

Let’s take the “revelations” at the episode one at a time…

1. The wedding that Ted was at in the season premiere — where he supposedly meets “The One” — is Barney’s. Believe it or not, that was not that big of a shocker. He’s the best man, and Marshall looked like he was also in the wedding party. We didn’t know about Punchy or any of these other circumstances at that point, and Ted doesn’t have a ton of friends. So the first guess is that he was at Barney’s wedding. It could have been Robin’s, because she would have a best man. But more than likely, it’s Barney’s.

Unless, of course, it’s also Robin’s wedding. Just because Barney reconnected with Nora at the end of the episode, it doesn’t mean that Nora is the one Barney is marrying. We spent the entire episode with Robin and Barney looking at each other longingly, telling each other in code that, while their relationship was bad for both of them, they did love each other for a time. Then Robin figured out, in her speech to Ted about Zoey, that just because life is scary doesn’t mean you revisit the past, no matter how comforting it is. The look on Barney’s face indicated that he agreed… somewhat.

Cut to the meeting with Nora. As Barney makes a coffee date with her and tells her that she looks beautiful and that “I thought it was too late for sun dresses,” Nora turns and says as she walks off, “It’s never too late, Barney.” As Barney says “Challenge Accepted!” Cobie Smulders did a great job of conveying that look of “Hey… she might be right!” on her face that we know Robin was feeling at that point.

So “a little while later” (we don’t know if that’s next year, 2013 or 2019), we see that Barney’s getting married. A lot can happen between now and then. It could be Robin, it could be Nora, or it could be someone completely different. Bah.