Parks and Rec Called the Cubs Winning the World Series… Two Years Ago

The end of beloved NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation left a hole in all our hearts. Though the stars have pretty much all gone on to do cool stuff since then — like Nick Offerman becoming the international face of woodworking — we still miss seeing the gang all together.

Luckily, this Chicagoan’s heart is full to bursting now that the Cubs have finally won the World Series. I’ll take any excuse I can get to write about either Parks and Rec or the Cubs, and this story is pretty much a perfect storm of Midwestern good times.

Check out this clip from an episode of Parks and Rec, written in late 2014 and set in the summer of 2017:

HOME RUN, SLAM DUNK, TOUCHDOWN. Eat your heart out, Back to the Future Part II. You missed by a whole year, but Parks and Rec got it bang-on.

The Washington Post interviewed series co-creator Michael Schur, who’s credited with writing in that detail. From WaPo:

“As soon as we decided to throw the last season of ‘Parks and Rec’ into the future, into 2017, we sort of started calculating what the world might be like,” Schur said. “We talked about… aspects of America that we could sort of casually mention that we thought would be funny.

“I was the only person on the staff who cared about baseball enough to track the Cubs’ minor league system,” he added with a laugh.

At the time the episode was written, the Cubs weren’t even in the playoffs. They were predicted to soon become postseason threats — as Schur told WaPo, “Every baseball writer in America knew the Cubs were going to be good” — but still, that prediction is kind of magical.

Almost as magical as this one:

Okay, so that one’s obviously fake. Pretty funny though.

What do you think? Are you going to comb through season seven of Parks and Rec to find more Nostradamus-type stuff? Let us know in the comments below or @WhatsTrending on Twitter!