So why did the informal panel for “How I Met Your Mother” involve only one member of the cast? Not that we’re complaining, you understand – if you’re gonna have one member, it might as well be Neil Patrick Harris – but, y’know, the absence of Cobie Smulders, Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, and Alyson Hannigan was certainly an obvious one…so obvious, in fact, that co-creator Carter Bays didn’t even wait for anyone to mention it.

“You probably read it in the paper,” said Bays. “It was just creative differences. The other four…we’ll figure it out. We’ll write around it.”

(Actually, Smulders was in London, doing Shakespeare, while Hannigan showed up later in the evening at CBS’s all-star party; no word on where Segel or Radnor were, but the former was probably working on the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which he wrote and stars in. As to the latter, I got nothing.)

I know I wasn’t the only critic in the house to be completely psyched about this panel, and, certainly, Harris, Bays, and Bays’ fellow co-creator, Craig Thomas, left everyone laughing.

* Earlier in the morning, Nina Tassler indicated that the show would finally, finally begin to get around to answering the question as to who the mother of Ted’s kids is, but one of the other reporters asked what all us were more or less thinking: “How much can you hint around before it starts to get annoying?”

“That’s the question we hope to answer,” said Thomas. “In episode one (of the third season), we’re going to see…basically, it’s going to be the biggest connection to the sort of larger search for the mother; episode one will show that we have not forgotten the title of our show, in a very exciting way.”

Bays also confirmed that, much as longtime fans have theorized, there have indeed been hints in previous episodes which will, in retrospect, become notably important. “Yeah, the thing that we love to do…sometimes, we plant things intentionally. Sometimes, little things grow out of…we’ll write one joke in season one, and that will turn into a entire episode in season three. So yeah, I think everything’s up for grabs. It’s in there.”

* The fantastic mall episode – which brought us the wickedly insidious Robin Sparkles song, “Let’s Go To The Mall” – was written by Kourtney Kang. The reason for Robin being Canadian occurred organically – Smulders is from Canada as well – but the writers have had to start taking it easy on the jokes about our neighbors up North. “It’s such filthy luctre for writers,” says Bays. “At first, it was just like, ‘We’ll just throw in a joke about how she’s Canadian,’ and we just couldn’t stop ourselves. And in every episode, we’re just making fun of it.”

Craig Thomas clarified the situation a bit more. “We approached Cobie and we said, ‘We’re going to make Robin Canadian. We’re going to do some comedy about that, but it’s going to be really smart. It’s going to be, like, our smart way of, like, showing the absurdity of American culture.’ And we didn’t do that even one time. We just completely sold her out immediately.”

* Based on the questions being asked, there are, it seems, plenty of critics who are still mad about the fact that, in the show’s very first episode, it’s confirmed that Robin is not the mother of Ted’s kids…and they’re not the only ones. “I still have family members who call me up and yell about that,” says Thomas. “I’m, like, ‘We said it in the pilot!’ ‘But, secretly, they’re going to get back together, right?’ ‘No, they’re not. That’s not the story.’ We very much did not want to do ‘Will
they or won’t they?’ As ‘Friends’ fans, we didn’t want to sort of run that playbook.”

Adds Bays, “It’s frustrating and bittersweet, and it drives you crazy, but that’s kind of what we like about it, that feeling that you get. I feel like it’s a very real relationship, these characters who are just perfect for each other except. They’re just almost there, but it’s not quite. And I feel like it opens up an avenue for a totally new relationship. We like that about Ted and Robin, that they’re just so hot for each other, but it’s not going to happen. I think it’s illuminated their relationship in an interesting way.”

* Best question asked: “Neil, in your daily life, how much pressure is there on you to be awesome?” The answer: “It’s exhausting. I’m, like, in the Emerald City and I’m the Wizard of Awesome.”

* The producers’ favorite episode: the one from last season where Ted finds out that his parents are divorced.

* There is talk to trying to bring back Wayne Brady to reprise his guest spot from last season.

* The big Marshall / Lily plot for the season involves them trying to find an apartment, with additional focus on Marshall trying to get a handle on his career aspirations.

* We’ll get more exploration into how Barney lost his virginity to his mom’s 45-year-old friend, Rhonda, who smelled like menthol cigarettes…and, God willing, we may actually get to meet her.

* What up with the slap bet? When are we going to see that gag continue to pay off…? Amazingly, Bays offered up a full-on spoiler about that…and I for one am psyched.

“In the first episode,” begins Bays, “where Barney is sitting at his computer, just there at work or whatever, and he gets a phone call. And it’s Marshall. And Marshall is, like, ‘Hey, you near your computer?’ Barney says, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, check your e-mail.’ Barney’s like, ‘All right, sure.’ So Barney opens up his e-mail, and there’s an e-mail from Marshall, and it’s a link to a website. And he’s like, ‘What is this?’ Marshall’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a new website. You should check it out.’ So he clicks
on it…and it’s slapcountdown.com.”

Yes, according to Thomas, “it’s timed exactly to a minute in a sweeps episode where slap number three will occur.”

Now that is awesome…

* …almost – but not quite – as awesome as the news that this season will bring another online exclusive for fans of the show: “How It Really Happened,” which will provide the version of events that Future Ted couldn’t tell his kids.

Explains Harris, “Since we film with no audience, we’re free to riff on bits and jokes sometimes because they already get five or six takes of it as written. They’ll try something different. And then they’ll come in with some radical thing, like the stripper episode of last season when you’re really not sure how the stripper broke her ankle. She just comes out of the room. But if you go to the website, you can see sort of a racier, raunchier version that shows what actually happened.”