One for the Road (Cheers) ladies' man, former baseball player, and bartender, and Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), a college graduate student, and cocktail waitress, had on-and-off relationships throughout first five seasons of the program (1982–1987) until Diane left Boston to pursue a writing career in the season five finale, "I Do, Adieu" (1987). This was Shelley Long's last contracted appearance as Diane Chambers. Six years after the season five finale, the Sam and Diane storyline is resurrected with a special guest appearance by Shelley Long and then concluded in the final episode. During season eleven there are many transformations before the finale. Woody Boyd (Woody
Home Is the Sailor (Cheers) promises nothing of the sort will occur again and is provisionally re-hired on the understanding that this is his last chance as Rebecca uses a seductive baseball metaphor-pun about having two outs, two strikes and "no balls". The producers intended "Cheers" to be a comedy about a comedy itself set in the Boston bar, but, as Burrows claimed, the "Sam and Diane" story arc predominated the show for five years and, as he hypothesized, would have made the bar more of a minor role and more irrelevant if Shelley Long had not left the show as Diane Chambers in 1987.