Celebrate our city of winners
Everyone will have their favourite Raps-win moment. Ours was captured on — where else? — Twitter, as young fans riding a packed subway car home after the Raptors were crowned NBA champions broke into a joyous rendition of O Canada.
They were black, brown, white, whatever — the cliché of multicultural Canada that actually turns out to be true, at least most of the time. It was the same on the streets outside, and in so many other places across the country. Celebrating after a big sports victory is to be expected, but this was on a different scale.
As it turns out, we needed a winner in ways we didn’t quite understand ourselves.
Of course we needed a winner to break a generation-long string of heartbreak in big-time sports. The Blue Jays’ World Series glory seasons in the early 1990s are an awfully long time ago now, and since then Toronto fans have been travelling a trail of tears.
But the mania for the Raptors has clearly been about more than just sports.
Toronto’s major league teams might have been piling up loss after loss over the past quarter-century (apologies to the Argos and Toronto FC), but the city itself has been on a long winning streak. It’s bigger, richer, more ambitious than ever. It’s jumped up into the urban major leagues. We wanted to celebrate that, and along came the Raptors to provide a focus for the pride we feel but don’t often find a way to express.
It makes it so much sweeter that the Raptors, like Toronto itself, have so often felt the sting of disrespect from south of the border.
No one there took the team seriously for years, and for most of that dispiriting time they had good reason. Even when the team became a legitimate post-season threat it was assumed it would fold when things got tough — and indeed it did. Who can forget the shame of being labelled “LeBronto” after King James brutally crushed the Raptors in last year’s playoffs?
That’s behind us now, and for that we can thank Masai Ujiri, the Raptors’ president who tore the team down to the studs and rebuilt it with a collection of unlikely players with something to prove.
At the beginning of the season, Ujiri made a passionate speech about the promise of Toronto, and told us to “believe in this city, believe in yourselves.” It was nice to hear, but most Torontonians weren’t quite there at the time. Now we are, as the victory celebrations show.
Perhaps it took an outsider, born in Britain and raised in Nigeria, to recognize the city’s new reality for what it is. Many of us (this page included) spend a lot of time pointing out the problems that remain amidst our success. We worry that celebrating the good things might mean overlooking the bad. But sometimes it’s worth simply focusing on the many things we’re doing right.
This is one of those moments. The Raptors have brought the city together, for sure. But they’ve done more than that. They’ve united other Canadians in support of the city they traditionally love to hate. Who would have thought we’d see exuberant crowds in Montreal and even Edmonton cheering on a Toronto team?
On Monday, Torontonians will have a chance to cheer on the Raptors once more as the official victory parade wends its way from Exhibition Place to Nathan Phillips Square.
Let’s show our support for a team that defied the nay-sayers and went all the way. Let’s applaud the vision and ambition behind Masai Ujiri’s conviction that this could be the Raptors’ time.
And let’s celebrate the city we’ve become, a place that no longer settles for second-best and also-ran. A city of winners.