Mere minutes after the Raptors bandwagon came up one point short against the Nets, a friend mentioned how much they are going to miss the city-wide atmosphere around the playoff run.
You know you live in Toronto when an opening round series, albeit a seven game series, is considered a playoff “run.” But in the 416, even Drake’s 416, seven games of playoff action is a europhic lifetime.
Soon my fellow citizens of Ford Nation will emerge from a different kind of stupor and realize we are right back where we always were: Drinking heavily from a cracked pipe full of offseason optimism. Who really needs abuse therapy? Toronto sports fans.
What do we have to look forward to? A remade TFC squad that still has loads of potential but will be without its best player during the World Cup? A last place Blue Jays team that seems to be more stable than its overhyped 2013 model, but in a division of titans that requires much more consistency? Or perhaps the gridiron Argos, who should have been in back to back Grey Cups last year save for the antics of some Steely rivals?
For basketball and hockey fans it’s now time for the offseason. The months where everyone is a champion and no one is a chump. It’s a season of fiction, fantasy, and forgetfulness. Of reality that is.
If you want to drift into true sports offseason fiction, check out the movie Draft Day. It stars a Kevin Costner decades removed from his Bull Durham glory, and the expansion of the Cleveland Browns who have to look even further back to the original franchise for true glory.
Draft Day is ninety minutes of cliches and Jennifer Garner modeling maternity wear. Then it erupts into thirty minutes of drama, tension, frustration, emotion, and elation. In fact it closes so fast, so unexpectedly, and so uniquely I actually cried during one scene.
So like any good Toronto sports fan who has proven they can weather the storm of defeat, Draft Day offers some highs after a bout of lows. It’s worth watching. It will stoke your offseason optimism.
Plus it will free you from my relentless campaign of Rob Ford puns.