Ian Johnson/Icon Sportswire via Getty ImagesParks and Recreation got one thing right when it stepped into the future.
During the NBC series' seventh season episode "Ron and Jammy," characters Tom and Andy visit Lucy in Chicago in 2017 and make some forecasting observations about life, including the fact that everyone is in a really great mood because the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.
Now, just two months shy of 2017, the show's prediction came true Wednesday night when the Illinois team broke their curse and won their first World Series in 108 years against the Cleveland Indians.
As the show's creator Mike Schur explained to The Washington Post, the brief line wasn't by accident. "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."
However, as he noted to the newspaper just last week, Schur's prediction was hardly out of left field. "It's not like I was only person who thought the Cubs were going to be good," he added. "Every baseball writer in America knew the Cubs were going to be good. I can't emphasize enough how little credit I feel like I should take for that prediction.
Schur's script is not the only thing to lay claim to predicting the win. A 1993 high school student has gone viral for his resurfaced senior quote: "Chicago Cubs. 2016 World Champions. You heard it here first."
Michael Lee's classmate remembered the prediction two decades later. "When [Lee and I] connected on Facebook in 2009, I sent him the photo and told him we were nearing 2016. He posted the photo of his prediction on August 8th," Marcos Meza told Chicago television station, WGN-TV. "After my Dodgers lost it was time for me to make this go viral and BeLEEve in the Cubs for 2016."