HBO has confirmed the long-speculated news that its flagship hit series "Game of Thrones" is taking a year off, EW reports exclusively.

The Emmy-winning sensation won’t be back for its final season until 2019.

The revelation means fans will have to wait longer than ever for the fantasy drama, which has grown its ratings year after year into one of the most popular shows in the world and HBO’s biggest hit of all time.

Last summer, it was reported that GoT might skip 2018, after the show’s showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss explained they planned to spend a year and a half crafting the show’s final episodes in an effort to make the final hours as spectacular and satisfying as possible (the eighth season, currently in production, is expected to film until this summer).

Later, HBO programming chief Casey Bloys confirmed that a 2019 date was indeed possible. Since then, star Sophie Turner let slip in a recent interview that she didn’t expect the show to come back until next year either.

But the question on fans’ minds is when, exactly, will GoT return? After all, a final season airing Jan. 1, 2019 is a rather different for fans than one airing Dec. 31, 2019. HBO is silent on that front. But given that the network opted to air GoT in the spring every year until a longer-than-usual production schedule pushed season 7 to last summer, a return to a spring launch seems logical.

The final season will also definitely be only six episodes as previously reported. While some episodes may be longer than usual, once again we’re hearing not to expect feature-length episodes throughout the season.