More love and marriage on ‘How I Met Your Mother’

By Kate O’Hare © Zap2it

Boy meets girl; boy marries girl; boy and girl have a boy and girl; boy tells his boy and girl how he met his girl.

In a nutshell, that’s the premise of the CBS comedy “How I Met Your Mother,” which ends after nine seasons with a one-hour series finale on Monday, March 31.If all goes as fans hope, by the time the last credits roll, New York architect Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) will at long last lock eyes — and who knows, maybe even lips — with “The Girl With the Yellow Umbrella” (Cristin Milioti), his future wife and the “Mother” of the title.

Also, retired playboy Bar-ney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) will have exchanged vows with news anchor Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), Ted’s ex-girlfriend, and spouses and new parents Marshall and Lily (Jason Segel, Alyson Hannigan), Ted’s longtime pals, will continue to be the adorable couple they’ve al-ways been.

Carter Bays, who cocre-ated and executive produces the show with his longtime pal and writing partner Craig Thomas (they met when Thomas became the drummer for Bays’ band at Wesleyan University), is just back from a week in Hawaii. Spending time in paradise with his wife and two chil-dren was intended to help him from the stress and ex-haustion of getting “HIMYM” (as fans call it) over the fin-ish line.

“I hadn’t really done the Hawaii thing,” he says, “and it was everything they said it would be.”

Of all the twists and turns of the final season (which has played out as one very long weekend before Barney and Robin’s wedding) and the finale, the end has always been in sight.

“I feel like the less we say about the finale, the bet-ter,” says Bays. “This is the ending we conceived when we conceived the show 10 years ago. It’s what we’ve been steadfastly writing to-wards ever since.”

If Barney and Ted finally both make it down the aisle, they’re going to be a few years behind the show’s creators, who loosely based “HIMYM” on their own experience as buddies sharing an apartment in New York. Both Thomas and Bays are husbands and fathers, but it was not always thus.“At the beginning of the series,” says Bays.