Although Freaks and Geeks never got within hailing distance of a second season, that didn’t stop Paul Feig and Judd Apatow from imagining what might become of their characters in a further future.

“I would keep my own private notes as the season went along,” says series creator Paul Feig, “but there was never a time when we sat around a table and said, ‘Let’s plan Season Two.’ It was really more just ‘Hey, it would be funny if’ or ‘This would be cool.’ But we so knew the writing was on the wall: We never got too deep into it, because we never thought it was going to happen.”

One thing he knew for sure was that, had the show gone on, his kids wouldn’t have stayed in high school forever. “It was going to become much more of a story of a small town and who gets out and who doesn’t.” And he still dreams of turning the series into a stage musical. “I want to bring the spirit of failure that I brought to TV to the Broadway stage. ‘Guys, don’t worry—you’re going to lose a lot of money up front, but 10 years from now people are going to be talking about this play.’”

Read more of Feig's Freaks and Geeks Season Two predictions below:

Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini)

Paul Feig: I always figured something bad was gong to happen to Lindsay when she was out with the Dead. [The series ended with her ditching a summer-school program to follow the Grateful Dead with Kim Kelly.] I was hoping the second season would open with her being taken out of a concert on a stretcher while Queen’s “Tie Your Mother down” plays. That’s all I had. But I thought it would be interesting—she comes back, has completely lost the trust of her family; so she’s in even deeper having been really been outed as a problem. But there wasn’t a strong direction I had for her; I just knew she’d probably end up at some point in her twenties in Greenwich Village as a performance artist, and after that she’d probably become a lawyer—a human-rights lawyer.

Sam Weir (John Francis Daley)

Sam’s future was going to be drama club. Because that was my experience in school: I got deep into drama club. That was the storyline I was most excited about, because I was going to portray what actually happened to me. I thought he’d be more on the stage crew than actually performing, just because that was kind of interesting, the guys that were keeping it together from behind the scenes. But my drama teacher, who was one of the biggest influences on my life creatively, was an alcoholic, and over the course of my sophomore through senior year, she got worse and worse and started depending on me. I’d get called away from class under the guise of an emergency, and it would be her on the phone saying, “You’ve got to come pick me up. I left my car at the bar last night.” So I was really excited to get that going, this weird kind of taking-care-of-an-adult relationship, while he’s still learning amazing stuff from her, this tortured drama-teacher soul. That bummed me out the most, not getting to play that story out.

Neal Schweiber (Samm Levine)

Another burning desire I had was to get Neal into swing choir. Now Glee has taken it and run with it, but I always thought that would be a funny world for Neal to go into. There’s a weird little clique, and you have all these inside jokes, and all these kind of obnoxious performance things you bond with people over—I just thought he would really blossom in there and think he was kind of the king of the school. We figured it could be his outlet while his parents are going through a really horrible divorce. Since Judd had gone through that in his real life, that was kind of going to be his domain—telling all his tales from adolescence through that.