Like with Bear’s Den brunch and frat party punch, TV in college is about choosing selectively. Winter break might have given you enough time to binge-watch “Breaking Bad” or catch up on the latest season of “Scandal,” but once Jan. 12 rolled around and the classroom moved from “How to Get Away with Murder” to your daily schedules, it was time to excise non-vital shows from your small-screen diet.

That advice goes double for shows past their prime—I could have saved 12 hours had I ignored the recycled humor of “How I Met Your Mother”’s last season, and my colleague Noah Jodice wrote in October about eliminating “The Big Bang Theory” from his weekly viewing habits. True story: my mom has 42 episodes of “Modern Family” lingering in DVR purgatory back home on the off chance I decide to return to the family comedy show.

NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation” seemed a prime candidate for this kind of sad demise this year. The show was uneven through Season 6, with stale jokes and inane plotlines taking on more of a central role. The news that the show would have its last hurrah condensed into seven weeks of back-to-back episodes—its last season would thus last about as long as the NFL playoffs—means that it would be fair to assume that the final hours were worth skipping.

I’m here to tell you that they’re not, and that this season of “Parks and Rec” has brought back the laughs—and tears, as I learned this week—in full force.

After the season’s strong debut, I was cautiously optimistic about immersing myself in Pawnee nostalgia one last time. Little did I expect to have to adjust my mental ranking of the sitcom’s top episodes, but then Tuesday night’s second episode, “Leslie and Ron,” aired.

It was the most affecting of the series, which is no small task for a show in its last dozen episodes. Without spoiling too much, the two titular characters have been feuding since the start of the season—to the point that Ron even tells Leslie she’s not good at scrapbooking—for an unknown reason, and this episode sees their friends lock them in the old Parks Department office until they work out the problem.

Ron, true to his curmudgeonly nature, would rather sit in silence than talk about his feelings, but Leslie annoys him in one of “Parks”’ typically hilarious montages until he agrees to discuss their history together. It’s mostly a bottle episode, and Leslie and Ron have the only speaking parts until the very end, allowing Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman to showcase the chemistry that has made their friendship pop from the show’s beginning.

Leslie and Ben have the sweetest marriage; April and Andy are the funniest couple; Leslie and Ann were the best friends. But Leslie and Ron have always owned the show’s emotional core, the unlikely pairing that worked because of a shared stubbornness, grudging respect and love of breakfast food.

“Leslie and Ron” is “Parks and Rec” at its sentimental, comedic best: it hits the show’s most emotional moment since Ben and Leslie sat on a small-park bench and culminates in the most creative television fart joke since, well, Jerry’s “fart attack” in Season 5.

The episode’s last scene could really have been the perfect shot on which to end the entire show, and at that moment, I wouldn’t have minded letting the last nine episodes go unwatched. But unlike “How I Met Your Mother,” whose finale really should have faded to black about five minutes earlier than it did, “Parks and Rec” has ultimately earned my hope for a similarly sentimental final moment.

So bye-bye, Li’l Sebastian, and bye-bye, “Parks and Rec.” You will soon be 5,000 candles, 125 episodes and one pit-turned-park in the wind.