In the end, even Jesus stayed dead longer than Brooklyn Nine-Nine. One day after Fox cancelled the sitcom, it was snapped up by NBC. For those of us who don’t live in the US, or for those of us who pay scant attention to traditional broadcasters, it’ll be like nothing has changed. The Nine-Nine lives on, and it’s all because of us.

The story is already legend.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine was brought back to life by its legion of devoted fans, who came together as one to tweet devastated GIFs and use devastated hashtags and generally yell “Like yeast!” to one another in a vaguely devastated way until a new network felt our misery and saved the day. The fans, the true beating heart of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, are what saved the show. It was us and nobody else.

A great story, but not necessarily a true one. After all, plenty of other shows have marked their demise with a similar online outcry. When ABC cancelled Agent Carter in 2016, 127,000 people signed a campaign asking Netflix to save it, but it still died. When Hannibal wasn’t renewed three years ago, a petition was started that people are still signing every few hours, but it hasn’t been enough to get it rescued. Nobody stepped in to save Angel, nobody stepped in to save Sense8 and no amount of bereft gnashing will convince anyone to save Designated Survivor.

But Brooklyn Nine-Nine is different. Because it has better fans? No. Because it’s a better show? No (although yes). The truth is a little more complicated, because NBC always had first dibs. Initially, Brooklyn Nine-Nine was pitched to NBC as part of a development deal that Mike Schur had with the network following the success of Parks and Recreation, although it was eventually sold to Fox. Robert Greenblat, the NBC Entertainment chairman who passed on the show, has already expressed contrition at letting it slip through his fingers. “Ever since we sold this show to Fox I’ve regretted letting it get away, and it’s high time it came back to its rightful home,” he said in a statement this week, adding that “Mike Schur, Dan Goor, and Andy Samberg grew up on NBC”.

Indeed, when you think of NBC comedy, you increasingly think of Mike Schur’s feelgood sensibility. It’s where Parks and Recreation grew from an anaemic Office spin-off into an unbelievably charming entity in its own right. It’s where The Good Place is fast redefining what a half-hour comedy can achieve. With this in mind it has always been downright strange that Brooklyn Nine-Nine – a broadly optimistic sitcom starring a Saturday Night Live alum from the Parks and Rec people – was never on NBC to begin with.

Plus, don’t forget that the writing was on the wall for a long time with Brooklyn Nine-Nine – there was talk that it might not last beyond its fifth series a full year ago – so NBC had plenty of time to see this coming and figure something out. As nice as it is to think that NBC revived the show because Mark Hamill was sad something like this has probably been lined up for months.

Whether it will be any good on NBC, though, is another thing entirely. If history can teach us anything about fan campaigns, it’s that we should always be careful what we wish for. When Scrubs jumped from NBC to ABC in 2009, it immediately became a harrowing shadow of its former self. The Mindy Project was never quite the same when it jumped from Fox to Hulu. The campaign to revive Futurama took what one of the all-time great television finales and buried it in a swamp of inferior product. You’ve seen what Arrested Development is like on Netflix. It’s enough to make you wonder why anyone ever brings anything back at all.

But, nevertheless, it’s worth holding out hope for Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s one of the smartest, silliest, most absurd, most human comedies of the last decade, and there’s too much talent involved for it to be ruined so easily. Ideally, it’ll continue its incredible run of no-fail episodes. But if not, we’ve got thirteen more episodes anyway. And that’s thirteen more cold opens than we would have had. Surely that alone is worth celebrating.