'How I Met Your Mother': The women in Ted's journey

"She's just so confident and badass and cool. I mean, the scotch, the cigars, the guns, the laser tag. She'’s kind of a guy," Thomas says. "She’'s hot and she can kick your ass. That's one of the things that I think [Ted and Barney] are so enamored of. She's so formidable, and yet there's that vulnerable side to her too. … Were they to be completely honest, I think Barney and Ted would both say that she sets a pretty high bar for any other girl to meet."

But don't expect the writers to pull a switcheroo and have Robin be the mother. "If we’'d said in the pilot she's not the mother and then somehow figured out some way to like loophole our way back into that, I would hate us."