Warning: This post contains spoilers for the "Ted Lasso" Season Three finale.
They say you always find your way back home.
In the Season Three finale of "Ted Lasso," the titular American football coach turned soccer manager does just that. But home isn't in England.
After a confrontation with his mother in the penultimate episode, Ted (Jason Sudeikis) goes to Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) to tell her he has some news —he's leaving AFC Richmond.
The 11th episode ends before viewers see Rebecca's reaction, but the finale opens with Ted asking if she's "ready to talk about it."
She's not.
What follows is essentially a Richmond goodbye tour. The team performs "So Long, Farewell" as a nod to Ted's love for "The Sound of Music."
Rebecca and Ted have an emotional heart-to-heart and express their gratitude for the impact they've had on each other's lives.
And right before the climactic match against rival West Ham United, the team watches an emotional highlight reel of the team's memories, which leaves everyone crying during the lineup.
In the end, AFC Richmond beats their rival while placing second overall in the league behind Manchester City. Despite being on the precipice of the ultimate victory, Ted boards a plane back to Kansas City to be with his son.
"There's no place like home," Ted says, during one last huddle with the team. "But there ain't a whole lot of places like AFC Richmond either."
Here's how the rest of the AFC Richmond crew fares after the 80-minute Season Three finale.
How does Season 3 of 'Ted Lasso' end?
While Ted leaves England to be with his family, the show's leading lady, Rebecca Welton, faces a similar decision in the finale: She can sell the club and fully let go of her ties to her ex-husband Rupert (Anthony Head). Or, she can embrace her leadership role and usher in a new era for the team as owner.
In the end, she picks the path predicted by a fortune teller at the beginning of Season Three, motherhood. Soccer motherhood, that is.
As she tries to make her decision, fans and the team make passing references to her as the club's matriarch, or its "mother."
The front-page headline of a newspaper that Ted picks up at the airport reveals that Rebecca ends up maintaining her ownership stake but sells 49 percent of shares to the fans.
To the devastation of fans hoping for Ted and Rebecca to make a romantic pair, the two friends stayfriends. Despite fulfilling many romantic comedy tropes, including a last-minute visit to the airport, they part with a tearful hug and a heartfelt unison, "Thank you."
Moments later, she runs into the Dutchman (Matteo van der Grijn) with whom she had shared an intimate evening in Amsterdam earlier in the season. While they didn't exchange names or contact information, fate intervenes and they cross paths again. One of her last lines of dialogue is Rebecca introducing herself to the Dutchman and his daughter, another nod to the psychic's motherhood prediction.
Meanwhile, Keeley (Juno Temple) reopens her PR firm with the financial backing of Rebecca and proposes a new project for the best friends: An AFC Richmond women’s soccer team.
Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), after first appearing to follow Ted back to Kansas City, reveals he doesn't want to leave Richmond, having fallen in love with Jane (Phoebe Walsh). In a twist straight out of "Friends," Beard gets off the plane and in the end, marries Jane with the backdrop of a sunset at Stonehenge.
As for the AFC Richmond team, Roy (Brett Goldstein) seems to take over as manager in Ted's stead, with Coach Beard and a reformed Nate (Nick Mohammed), whose play helped Richmond clinch their final game, assisting. They recreate the torn "Believe" sign with the shreds of yellow paper because as it turns out, the players had saved the pieces all along (they pieced them back together as a morale boost during a break from the West Ham match).
Not all the threads were neatly tied up, however. The love triangle between Roy, Keeley and Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) continues.
Earlier in the episode, the two new friends get into a physical fight over who should get to be with Keeley. When they show up on her doorstep, bloodied and bruised, and ask her to pick between them, she throws them out of her house.
In the flash forward, the threesome is seen laughing, suggesting their friendship is fine, but their romantic futures are a mystery.
But one thing seems crystal clear: Ted Lasso isn't coming back.
In the last shot of the film, Ted coaches Henry's (Gus Turner) soccer team, with his ex-wife Michelle (Andrea Anders) looking on, and reminds his son what to do after messing up.
The show's fitting final words hearken back to the advice he gave Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) in one of the first episodes, and one of the moments that made fans fall in love with the show: Be a goldfish.
Will there be a Season 4 of 'Ted Lasso'?
Since the Season Three premiere, the team behind "Ted Lasso" has been tight-lipped on the fate of the series.
Sudeikis told Deadline in March that the third season marked the "end of the story that we wanted to tell, that we were hoping to tell, that we loved to tell."
Farewell posts from the cast suggest that this may truly be the end of the road for "Ted Lasso."
Brett Goldstein, who plays Roy Kent and writes the show, expressed his gratitude for "Ted Lasso" in a moving Instagram post May 31 that started with, "And now the end is here."
"It’s been fxxxing wonderful. Let’s go Greyhounds…," Goldstein signed off.
Meanwhile Kola Bokinni, who plays captain Isaac McAdoo, shared a post to commemorate the release of the finale.
"So long, Farewell ... for now," he wrote. "Thank you to everyone who believed."
Further, the IMDB page for the show displays its span as 2020 to 2023, indicating the end really is finale.
But fans are hoping for a miracle.
Some people pointed out that the fate of the rest of AFC Richmond might not be so set in stone considering the montage of happy endings abruptly ends when Ted wakes up on the plane after landing back in the U.S.
Was everyone's fate all just Ted's dream of their future?
"The scene at the end where it shows what happens to everyone turns out all to be a dream. It might not be the end after all?! I’m holding out hope, but either way I’m happy with that ending!" one person wrote on Twitter.
Co-creator and starBrendan Hunt, the co-writer who plays Coach Beard, debunked the theory during a Reddit AMA, and said the events of the epilogue were "real" and not a dream.
Some fans are also holding onto hope for a spinoff, citing one of the show's final scenes as a hint for its future.
Journalist Trent Crimm, who followed the team to write a book about AFC's Richmond's season, originally titled his magnum opus "The Lasso Way."
But after reviewing the manuscript, Ted leaves a note on the cover page.
"One small suggestion ... I'd change the title. It's not about me. It never was," he wrote.
Later, Trent autographs copies of his book, now titled "The Richmond Way."
A spinoff entitled "AFC Richmond" instead of "Ted Lasso"? To quote Ted Lasso himself, "Smells like potential."