How I Met Your Mother finale: Still no mother

Another season of "How I Met Your Mother" slipped away without the Bob Saget voice-over telling the viewers (or Ted's kids) how Ted met his kids' mother. But at least we learned at the end of Monday's season finale that he will meet her in the university architecture class he started teaching after giving up on his professional career as an architect, after getting his butt kicked by a goat.

One more thing we learned: you could make a killer drinking game that involves chugging a beer every time you spot a new prop used to camouflage actress Alyson Hannigan's pregnancy.

There may have been more examples Monday, but I toasted Lily's oversized party favor for Ted's surprise 31st birthday party, the bulky coat folded in Lily's arms during a hospital visit, and a gimongous, lime green bowl that Lily inexplicably held on her lap (popcorn?) while offering the tortured metaphor that it was time for Ted and everyone else to take the leap and see what life has in store.

No chug was necessary for the cheesy, slow-motion montage that showed Marshall, Robin, Barney, Lily and Ted jumping the 6-foot-chasm to the rooftop hot tub of the neighboring building, because clearly they used a body double for Lily. The Screen Actors Guild must have negotiated some pretty strict concessions prohibiting TV shows from forcing pregnant actresses to leapg across make-believe rooftops.

Lily also uncorks a howler of a metaphor comparing Ted the unhappy architect  to the goat she rescued during a kindergarten show-and-tell with one of those farmers you always see tending herds in Manhattan. Something about comparing Ted chasing a professional career as an architect to the goat's obsession with chewing up a bath cloth in Ted's apartment, but who knows.

These are minor quibbles, though, for a finale that appears to set Barney and Robin up for another crack at romance. Not before  Barney offers his own clumsy metaphor to Ted as he compares Robin to a beautiful, double-breasted Canadian suit that Ted tried on and returned.

"Then I try it on. I don't want to take the same suit, but at the same time, I really like the suit," Barney explains.

Ted is too distracted at the time worrying about how to design a Texas ribs restaurant in the shape of a Stetson to do more than offer Barney his hasty blessings, while Barney is unaware that Robin is standing in the doorway the whole time listening to his awful analogy.

In a panic, Robin tells Marshall and Lily about Barney's affection for her, looking for an escape. They wisely advise to try using the "Mosby" to scare off Barney. The "Mosby," of course, gets its name from poor, clueless Ted, who terrified Robin on their first date when he told her, "I think I love you."

Robin tries it out during Ted's surprise party, and sure enough, it scares Barney off temporarily. This sequence prompts recurring visions of lame "Happy Days" scenes where the Fonz struggled to say he was "Wr-wr-wr-wrong." But Barney eventually comes around when he figures out that she's just using the Mosby on him, something about her being too scared to admit her own feelings for a man who is neither Canadian nor a hockey player.

Cue mad, passionate kiss between Barney and Robin in Ted's hospital room after Ted's grappling match with the goat, and we're set for some madcap Ross-and-Rachel hijinks next season, I'm guessing.

That, or we'll meet the mother of Ted's children, but there's no rush.