It’s nearly time to say goodbye to all the advertising intrigue and pensive staring out of windows with glasses of scotch brought to us by all our friends at the agency currently known as Sterling Cooper & Partners. Yes, Mad Men‘s final seven episodes will be premiering this spring, and at a TCA panel this morning, it was announced what the day would be: April 5th, 2015, about a full calendar year since the first half of Season 7 premiered.

The program that ushered in a new era of basic-cable supremacy back in 2007 has only seven weeks to wrap up all the storylines of everyone’s favorite troubled womanizing alcoholic Don Draper and his family, Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Roger Sterling, Joan Harris, every other person who’s become important on that show, and, if that weren’t enough, all of the 1960s. It’s a pretty herculean task, but creator Matthew Weiner seems to think they’ve done it right.

via Deadline
“Now that it’s over, I’m very excited that it’s not over,” Weiner said of the upcoming seven episodes, acknowledging “it’s going to be weird to get to the point where there’s no new ones.”

The network’s decision to cut the final season in to two separate batches airing nearly a year apart informed how Weiner ended the show, he said. “I welcomed this as opportunity to treat it thematically, “ he said. April’s first episode will feel like a “premiere” and each of the finale episodes “feels like the finale of the show.”

“When you read them it’s like ‘Wow, what’s going to be next week?” Weiner forecast.

It’s only a few months away now, but we’re already dreading/welcoming that moment when the clock finally ticks over from 1969 to 1970 and a huge chunk of our television watching, covering people in one of the most important and tumultuous decades in American history, will be at an end. Let’s just hope Don Draper doesn’t jump out the window at the end. Dick Whitman can, though.