The bad news: Parks and Recreation is about to kick off its final season. (We know, we know. We're in denial, too.) Let's look on the bright side, though: Instead of an untimely cancellation, we get a full, 13-episode farewell to our beloved Pawnee pals, complete with a bold time jump to the year 2017.

We yanked executive producer Michael Schur away from the editing bay for a few moments ("I'm happy for the excuse to not work," he jokes) to talk about Parks and Rec's final episodes, the many brushes with cancellation the show managed to survive, and Schur's favorite Pawnee character outside the main cast. (Understandably, he had a tough time deciding.)

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Shooting on Parks and Rec wrapped back in December (Schur and series star Amy Poehler co-wrote the series finale together), and he says that's when he started to realize it was really over. "The majority of the wave hit me around the time we wrapped the finale. I'm fortunate that I get to ease out a little bit, because I'll still be editing for another three or four weeks. So it's been a nice, slow fade. It's sort of spread the sadness over a longer period of time."

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But this isn't the first time Schur has had to mentally prepare himself for Parks to end. "It's either the fifth or sixth time we've written a series finale, depending on how you count," he laughs, remembering all the times Parks wasn't guaranteed a renewal. "We did it at the end of Season 3. We did it at the end of Season 4. We did it midway through Season 5, and then again at the end of Season 5."

That episode midway through Season 5 was "Leslie and Ben," aka Leslie Knope's very sweet wedding to co-worker Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), which felt like the perfect capper for the series. But then, as Schur recalls, "we got our back-nine order, so we just kept going. Then at the end of the year, we were like, 'Well, we don't know if we're coming back for Season 6, so we better do it again!'"

But last season's finale, which zoomed three years into the future to show us Leslie in command of the local National Parks Service office, actually wasn't meant to be a series finale, Schur says. NBC agreed to renew Parks for Season 7, "so suddenly we knew we had another year. And then we had this moment where we could've either blown everything up and thrown away all this stuff we've been working towards, or we could just try to figure out a way to leap forward and add something to the end of that story that made it still exciting to think about next year. And we came up with an idea of jumping into the future."

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Schur calls the time jump "good for a lot of reasons," including being able to leap right past Leslie's just-revealed pregnancy with triplets; in 2017, Leslie and Ben's kids are fully out of the womb. "It seemed like a way to skip the slightly tired sitcom stories of, 'They're new parents and their sleepless nights are so crazy!' We could skip the pregnancy, the birth, all that stuff. And also just in general, the idea of Leslie taking a new job, we'd already seen that… So it was like, 'Oh, we can skip three years of that!'"

The fact that this is Parks' final season meant Schur and his staff had nothing to lose and inspired them to go all-in with the time jump, he says: "It's a move you make when you know you only have one year left. We threw all the spinning plates as high as we could in the air, and we don't have to worry about where they land, really."