Is the university in 'The Last of Us' based on Colorado State? Here's what we could find.

Spoiler alert: This article contains information about episode six of "The Last of Us," which aired Sunday on HBO.

You know you're in the thick of it as a journalist when you're trying to confirm how long a journey would take on horseback.

That's where I found myself after Sunday's episode of "The Last of Us," HBO's popular adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game franchise of the same name.

In both the game and show — which depict the journey of protagonists Joel and Ellie as they trek across the U.S. 20 years after a parasitic fungal infection outbreak devastates mankind — the unlikely duo eventually end up at the fictional University of Eastern Colorado.

Fans of "The Last of Us" have been speculating about possible real-life inspirations behind the university, which Joel and Ellie find abandoned in Sunday's episode. Given its mascot, school colors and general location, some members of the Fort Collins subreddit have inferred that the fictional school could be partially based on Colorado State University.

Even Gov. Jared Polis speculated about its similarities in a Tuesday Facebook post.

Video game developer Naughty Dog, which developed the "The Last of Us" franchise and released its first part in 2013, didn't return the Coloradoan's requests for comment. An HBO spokesperson, however, responded to the Coloradoan's request Wednesday evening, confirming through "The Last of Us" production designer John Paino that the University of Eastern Colorado was indeed inspired by CSU.

Here's why some "The Last of Us" fans saw CSU in the game and show's university scenes.

A USA Today review:HBO's 'The Last of Us' is the best video game adaptation ever

A little background on the latest episode of 'The Last of Us'

After a harrowing journey west, Sunday's episode finds Joel and Ellie in Wyoming, where Joel reunites with his brother, Tommy.

Tommy has landed among a thriving community in Jackson, Wyoming, where hundreds of fellow outbreak survivors built a small fortified settlement with modern comforts rarely found in the post-outbreak world.

Joel and Ellie's stopover is short-lived, however, as they soon set off to find the University of Eastern Colorado, where Tommy says some Fireflies — members of the revolutionary militia group Joel is trying to connect Ellie with — have set up a base of operations.

Where is the University of Eastern Colorado?

Though the Coloradoan couldn't confirm this, a wiki site dedicated to "The Last of Us" lists the location of the University of Eastern Colorado as Boulder.

However, details seen on campus in the game — as well as some dialogue from the show — muddy the waters about the school's actual location and inspiration.

In the show, Tommy tells Joel the fictional university is about a week's ride southeast from Jackson, and that once he and Ellie hit Interstate 25, the school is hard to miss.

Without diving too far into my research about the many natural gaits of horses, I can somewhat confidently surmise that an endurance-trained trail horse can travel up to 100 miles in a day — thanks savvyhorsewoman.com! If we assume that's the amount of daily miles Joel and Ellie managed to cover on horseback in Sunday's episode, their five-day journey likely would have taken them closer to Fort Collins than Boulder.

Using a route that takes you down I-25, Fort Collins is around 500 miles southeast of Jackson while Boulder is an additional 50 miles south — including a more arduous 20-mile trek off of I-25.

CSU, by comparison, is located roughly 5 miles off of the interstate.

What does the campus look like in 'The Last of Us'?

When Joel and Ellie get to the University of Eastern Colorado in Sunday's episode, they're greeted with etched stone signs that read "University of Eastern Colorado" and "Home of the Big Horns" — a possible nod to CSU's ram mascot.

The campus is overgrown and littered with vestiges of its pre-outbreak life, including a frozen-in-time homecoming poster from September 2003 — when the cordyceps infection outbreak began.

Another campus poster in the episode shows that at least one of the University of Eastern Colorado's colors was green, while signage around the university in part one of the video game seems to show the school's colors as both green and gold, like CSU's.

In the show, Joel and Ellie pass a stately red and white brick campus building, which looks more like CU's Old Main building than any building at CSU — though CSU did have a similarly styled (and named) Old Main building of its own that burned down in 1970.

CSU then and now:Travel back in time to see how these campus spots have (and haven't) changed

Additional signage in Sunday's episode points out directions to various campus buildings like the Lowes Law Library, McNiven Cameron Law Center, Phelan Center and a Biomedical Sciences Building, which is where Joel and Ellie have heard the Fireflies have set up shop.

While I couldn't find any connection to most of the campus buildings named in the show, CU does have a law school, while CSU does not. CU also has something called the Phelan Lab, which studies the chemical ecology of environmental and host-derived microbiome communities at its Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver, according to the university's website.

Sunday's episode, like the rest of this season of "The Last of Us," was filmed in Alberta, Canada, according to HBO.

As an aside, here's what a CSU entomologist said about the real-life fungi from 'The Last of Us'

While "The Last of Us" has plenty of people frantically Googling "cordyceps" — the mutated version of an actual fungus that infects and prompts "zombie-like" behavior in certain insects — a CSU entomologist says not to worry about a real-life outbreak playing out like in the game or show.

Maia Holmes, an entomologist and education and outreach coordinator for CSU's department of agricultural biology, told CSU news site Source that, unlike the arthropods that cordyceps infects, humans have complex nervous systems and high body temperatures that most fungi can't thrive in.

And while climate change is presenting fungi with the chance to adapt to higher temperatures, the human brain is far too complicated for an organism to hijack like you've been seeing on your TV screen, Holmes told Source.

'Zombie ant fungus' in humans?:Climate change sparks fungi fears — some serious and some silly

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Is a university in 'The Last of Us' based on CSU? Here's what we found