Ted Lasso certainly knows how to play the long game. And I'm not talking about overtime after 90 minutes on the field. No, the series manages to methodically, and satisfyingly, plot the emotional arcs of every character on screen while still landing a satisfying pun. Case in point: Season 2, Episode 12 introducing the newly independent Trent Crimm, or, formerly Trent Crimm, The Independent.

So what's next for Trent Crimm, following his dismissal from the reporter's room? The finale, "Inverting The Pyramid Of Success," might have given us all the hints we need to make some educated guesses. In one of the final scenes of Season 2, Ted and Trent have a quick heart-to-heart that's random enough to invite inspection. There's the necessary explanation for Trent's absence at the press conference, and then there's talk of bicycles before the scene ends with the former reporter's keys stuck in the car.

So... what does it all mean? What's next for Trent Crimm?

Perhaps a role in the Ted Lasso universe that's far bigger and more significant than we could have imagined. Let's dig in.

Bill Lawrence has already confirmed that James Lance's Trent Crimm will have a "significant" role in Season 3 of Ted Lasso, despite the fact that the character no longer works for The Independent. But we didn't need Lawrence to tell us that — the minute-long scene with Ted at the end of Season 2 alluded to it. Some might think Trent locking his keys in the car was simply a sight gag, but of course we should be looking for metaphors in a literature-obsessed series. (What would your eighth grade English teacher say to you if you didn't?) Trent locking his keys in the car points, quite simply, to the fact that Trent isn't going anywhere.

Some have speculated that Trent himself will begin working for AFC Richmond, perhaps by filling the recently vacated gap as the league's head of PR. Instead, I think we've already seen Trent's next step. Two seasons worth of it, to be exact.

Because Ted Lasso might actually be the work of the independent Trent Crimm.

Ted Lasso being Trent's project would be a meta conclusion to the series, but not entirely surprising. Though Ted is the main character of the show, there's always been a sort of distance between viewers and the AFC Richmond coach. We could attribute this to a bout of emotional unavailability — given his aversion to therapy and tendency to mask feelings with humor — or, it's simply the realities of the third person. We don't really ever know what's going on in his head, which is why his panic attacks seem to come on so suddenly. In fact, there's only one character in the entirety of Ted Lasso whose head we have been inside: Trent, during the concluding moments of Season 1, Episode 3, "Trent Crimm: Independent."

There's also the implied fact that Trent, himself, has daddy issues. During that final scene with Ted, the coach points out that the reporter is now "Trent Crimm, independent," to which Trent replies:

If Trent were the auteur of Ted Lasso, that would justify the topic being a running theme of the series.

Plus, while Ted's always quick with a quip, could a football coach really be that clever, or is a journalist simply punching up dialogue from memory? In fact, can the oversized personalities of all of Ted Lasso's characters be an author's exaggeration? Including the author himself, who writes Trent Crimm as a cool cat with a "whole vibe" who "is darn good" at his craft?

Perhaps its too complicated a twist for Ted Lasso, and, instead, the scene was simply setting up a jaunty bicycle trip between Trent and Ted. But I'd simply like to #believe Trent Crimm tripped on LSD before sitting down to write "Beard After Hours." And I believe in believe.