Ted meets a cute girl, Holli, at MacLaren's. He brags to Marshall, Robin, Barney and the empty space where Lily should be that he got her number. Ted wants to call her right away, but Barney grabs his phone from him and reminds Ted that you have to wait three days to call a girl. When Ted protests that a three-day wait is insane, Barney tells him Jesus is the one who came up with it (right before he invented the high-five) and it's what He wants Ted to do. Ted promises to wait three days to call if Barney will just stop talking (which he doesn't). Ted never promised not to send Holli text messages though, and so he does. He starts out with a lame "Texty text," but their conversations heat up quickly. At home, Ted tells Robin he's really falling for Holli, but then he gets a text from her that was clearly meant for someone else. It reads: "Hey baby, picked up some takeout at Gennaro's. Be home soon. And then I want you to do me on the couch." Poor Ted.

When Robin goes to MacLaren's to meet up with Barney and Marshall, she sees that Marshall has a bag of take-out from Gennaro's and realizes that the guys have been pretending to be Holli. Barney swiped Ted's cell that first night that Ted and Holli met, replaced her number with his work cell number and they've been faking Ted out ever since, with some help from fellow MacLaren's patron Stan. They only strung Ted along as long as they did because they've been waiting for him to tell Holli he loves her. See, they want him to get all his awkward over-sharing out of the way on fake Holli before he calls real Holli. And also? They're having a lot of fun. Robin makes them promise to confess their chicanery to Ted, but of course they don't. Instead they have their fake "Holli" explain away the explicit text by saying that her friend Marsha grabbed the wrong phone and thought she was texting her husband Billy (wait for it; there you go).

Robin tells Ted the truth and they decide turnabout is fair play, so Ted sends "Holli" a text that he sometimes has gay dreams about his best friend. Marshall assumes Ted's talking about him. Barney insists Ted must have been talking about him. When they finally see Ted, they try to get him to reveal which one of them he secretly desires, so he wastes their time with a long, pointless story and then tells them that Robin spilled the beans and he knows about their shenanigans. PWNage! Holli meets him at the booth and they leave together for their first date. Holli, too, is an awkward over-sharer, hell-bent on commitment. And she does what I might have once thought was impossible -- she scares Ted off by mentioning love and marriage. Saget!Ted brings us home by explaining that although he didn't need to wait three days that time, Holly really did. "Like a lot of rules, there are times to follow them, and times to not. But I will tell you this: when I got your mother's number, I called her right away." Awwww.

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