How I Met Your Mother is a show that is riddled with overarching storylines that are often revisited over the course of its nine-season run.
Like Robin Sparkles.
The slap bet.
And the Slutty Pumpkin, who was first mentioned in the first season.
Ted met her at a Halloween party on the roof, and realised that she was the perfect girl for him, but ended up losing her number.
Thinking that he just let his future wife walk away from him, Ted wore the same costume for the next five Halloweens, hoping to run into the "Slutty Pumpkin" again.
And he does. Almost 10 years after their original meeting, Ted finally tracks down the "Slutty Pumpkin," aka Naomi in the Season 7 episode "The Slutty Pumpkin Returns."
And OK, sure, it didn't work out. She wasn't "the mother."
But here's the thing, Ted actually crossed paths with Naomi four years before tracking her down.
Naomi made a brief cameo, in a blink-and-you-miss-it scene in the Season 9 episode "The Poker Game."
Through a flashback sequence in the episode, Ted is shown to be obsessing over Marshall and Lily not giving him a thank you note for the wedding present he bought them.
Ted being Ted just had to drive the point home by going for a Halloween party as a thank you note.
BUT, if Ted hadn't been so obsessed with the entire thank you note thing, he would have noticed the girl he'd spent years searching for, standing just a few feet away from him.
And at least he would have gotten done with this trainwreck a few years earlier.
