2016: Thanks for the memories

Encarnacion's last big moment as a Blue Jay

The first thing you noticed was the goofy ski goggles perched on Edwin Encarnacion's forehead in the aftermath of his electrifying home run that sank the wild-card hopes of the Baltimore Orioles. His 'We Came To Reign' T-shirt was drenched with champagne. He had just left a boisterous celebration in the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse.

You sensed that this would be a fitting epitaph to Encarnacion's sensational 7 1/2-year run in a Blue Jays uniform. It turned out it was.

Encarnacion signed a $60-million (U.S.), three-year contract with the Cleveland Indians last week.

At the time, it was hard to tell if Encarnacion knew this was his last big moment with Toronto. His mammoth three-run shot, in the bottom of the 11th inning in early October, sent the Rogers Centre crowd into a frenzy and lifted the Blue Jays to a 5-2 win over the Orioles in the one-game American League wild-card shootout.

The home run ranks as one of the most iconic in the history of the Blue Jays, right up there with Joe Carter's skip-inducing blast that won Toronto the World Series in 1993 and Jose Bautista's bat-flip shot from 2015, which vanquished the Texas Rangers in the AL Divisional Series.

"Whoo, we got this," Encarnacion blurted out to no one in particular when he entered the centre of the hullabaloo afterward in the Toronto clubhouse.

The 33-year-old from the Dominican became a fan favourite despite – or maybe because of – his shy, introverted persona that contrasted to that of Bautista, whose swagger was always in full bloom.

Although he is fluent in English, Encarnacion prefers to use an interpreter when he speaks to the media in a group setting, and that was the case that October night when he sat in the interview room in a sodden shirt and wearing silly goggles.

Robert MacLeod

Leicester's underdogs have their day

The King Power Stadium is pretty ordinary by North American standards, seating just 32,000 people and stuck in a drab part of Leicester. But on May 2 when Leicester City won the Premier League title there was no better place to be, even though it was empty.

The Foxes weren't playing that day. Instead Leicester had to watch to see if its closest rival, Tottenham, could beat Chelsea to stay in the race for first. The Spurs went up 2-0, leaving fans in Leicester stuck to their seats in the bars around the King Power. Then Chelsea came back and tied it 2-2. And that was it. Leicester had overcome 5,000-to-1 odds, a measly payroll and a history of underperformance to win one of the biggest crowns in soccer.

And then the fans came. First a trickle, then a flood. They just wanted to gather somewhere, and where better than the sprawling parking lots and walkway around the King Power?

They brought flags and banners. They wore Leicester wigs and shirts. They slapped hands and sang. Boy, did they sing. Black, brown, white, together in unison, sharing the moment of a lifetime.

Rob Coe was there. He'd been a Leicester fan for 40 years and when asked to sum up the feeling, he didn't hesitate. "For me it's better than the birth of my children," he said as his two children stood beside him, nonplussed at the potential slight. "I knew that I would have children as part of growing up, you know you are going to have children. However, I never knew that Leicester City was going to win the championship."

How about Mayor Peter Soulsby? He'd been fielding calls and interview requests from across Europe and as far away as Japan. Everyone wanted to know how a team from a small city in the Midlands could triumph over the soccer powerhouses in Manchester and London.

"We thought discovering the king in a car park was long enough odds," he said, referring to that other Leicester miracle, the discovery in 2012 of the body of King Richard III underneath a city parking lot. Soulsby remembers going to Foxes' games back in the 1960s. "It was cold, it was wet. It was a grubby stadium and a mediocre team."

Not anymore. At least not on May 2, 2016. A day to be cherished by underdogs everywhere and fans of any sport.

Paul Waldie

The calm before the 100-metre storm

The thing that makes the Olympic men's 100-metre final the most electric live event in all of sports is the noise. Not the amount of it, but the lack thereof.

The atmosphere in the moments before the runners arrive is frantic. In Rio, it was the first instant that felt magical.

How did I spend this glorious, once-in-a-lifetime time? Well, the wireless had collapsed in the press box on deadline, so I spent it slamming my fists on the desk, near tears of rage, shrieking curses at Brazil, Brazilians, technology and God.

Edifying.

Then it came back.

The Brazilian wedged in beside me squeezed my arm – as you would a dangerous lunatic – and said, "We are all the same when the WiFi goes."

Something about the quick leap from prosaic ('I'm going to get myself fired at the Olympics') to the poetic ('I'm sitting at the very centre of the planet's attention') lent what followed a surreal air.

Andre De Grasse, Usain Bolt and six others entered the Estadio Joao Havelange. The roaring crested. During the intros, Bolt rubbed dirt off his shoulder. De Grasse popped his jersey.

I've suffered through the 2010 World Cup – the vuvuzela World Cup. So I know loud. This was an altogether different sort. Manic. Keening. Close to hysterical.

The eight finalists approached the blocks. The noise slackened suddenly, like an aural tent collapsing in on itself. Then it disappeared altogether. The sonic distance between standing beside a jet-fighter engine and sitting alone on some soft shore was so short and sudden, it was disorienting.

In that moment, all you could hear was the soft wash of the rotor blades of a military helicopter hovering above. Then the gun.

Cathal Kelly

Meeting trailblazer Fred Sasakamoose

So many hockey fans, and so many Canadians, know about Willie O'Ree. He was the New Brunswicker who broke the colour barrier in the NHL on Jan. 18, 1958.

Far fewer people know about Fred Sasakamoose, and that is a shame. He was a trailblazer, too, the NHL's first full-blooded aboriginal player when he suited up for the Chicago Black Hawks on Feb. 27, 1954.

Fred's career was short – only 11 games for a struggling Chicago team – but his legacy is long. He opened the door for a lengthy list of native players, including Montreal goalie Carey Price, whose mother was the first woman elected to the board of directors of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.

In December, I travelled to central Saskatchewan to meet and interview Fred in what was easily my most memorable assignment of the year. He was only 6 when he was taken from his parents and sent to a residential school for 10 years. He is 83 now, and the sexual abuse to which he was subjected there still haunts him today.

His life is dedicated now to helping youths on the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation. It is a place that is without great riches, and one where young people are challenged by drug addiction and HIV.

"Why are children taking their lives?" Fred asked, a question with no easy answer. "We don't know what to do anymore."

Fred started a minor hockey program so kids on the reserve have a safe and healthy place to play. He smiles broadly as he watches them skate in a rink that bears his name.

He took me for a drive on a frigid day in December, and showed me the ruins of the log house where he grew up, and the slough where his grandfather taught him to skate. His body shook as he cried, overwhelmed by so many memories, good and bad.

He had the courage to allow his life to unfold before me, through his words and through his eyes. It was a mixture of drama, love and pain. I thank him for it.

Marty Klinkenberg

Veteran QB Burris earns accolades in Grey Cup

Watching what veteran quarterback Henry Burris did on Grey Cup night in Toronto was one of the most feel-good things I witnessed on the job in 2016. Over the past four seasons, the 41-year-old quarterback had taken two different teams to three Grey Cup games. He was on the losing side in the 2013 and 2015 games, and his Ottawa RedBlacks – a three-year-old franchise – were the underdogs going into the 2016 Cup against a Calgary Stampeders squad gunning for the best season in CFL history.

Up in the press box in the hour before game time, reporters suddenly began murmuring: "Burris just limped off the field with a knee injury in warmup; he may not play." We stared down as RedBlacks backup Trevor Harris warmed up and Burris was nowhere to be seen. But just as the game was about to start, Smilin' Hank bolted out of the BMO Field tunnel and sprinted to Ottawa's sideline, good to go.

I thought of the countless times I've interviewed Burris and his knack for remembering reporters from every CFL city. I remembered our candid conversations about being cast off by Calgary and Hamilton.

On Grey Cup night, the veteran pivot passed for a spectacular 461 yards and five touchdowns in Ottawa's overtime win, earning Grey Cup MVP honours. I talked to him on the field after the game, as he stood with a championship hat on his head and his arm wrapped tightly around his the shoulders of his wife, Nicole. They wore matching wide grins. Husband and wife looked at one another carefully as he faced questions about retirement. The gregarious couple politely declined to comment – they needed more time to think over his future. I wondered if it was the last time I would interview Henry Burris. If so, my last on-field memory of a QB destined for the Hall of Fame would be of jubilant Ottawa fans reaching over the field wall as he left reporters that night. They chanted his name and extended their hands, wanting to give Burris long-awaited congratulations.

Rachel Brady

TFC fans show New Yorkers how to be nice

It took a chance encounter on a New York subway train for this newbie soccer writer to finally realize how much the makeup of Toronto sports fans has changed. And how much better that makes us all. Toronto has not been Toronto The Good, the bastion of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant conservatism, for a long time. But in sporting terms that is only a relatively recent change.

We can thank the two newest professional teams for this. The Toronto Raptors arrived in 1995 and Toronto FC came along 11 years later. Both have the most diverse fan bases of Toronto's five major professional sports teams, which is no surprise because basketball and soccer are the games with the most global appeal.

Anyone who spends most of their sporting moments around the Toronto Maple Leafs can be slow to realize this. The Leafs are still No. 1 in Southern Ontario and their popularity drives their ticket prices, which means the crowds at Air Canada Centre still have much in common with the old whitebread Toronto: corporate and quiet.

But a new assignment gave me a look at what may be the new normal for Toronto fans. I was in New York for the second game of the two-leg Major League Soccer playoff series between TFC and New York City FC. As I waited to board the subway in midtown Manhattan to go to Yankee Stadium, the sounds of a chanting, singing crowd drifted down the stairs.

A train pulled in a few seconds later and I took a seat as the chants grew louder. I assumed it was a group of New York soccer fans. But the car was quickly jammed by dozens of people dressed in TFC red, complete with team scarves.

Normally, this would be cause for concern, given the world-wide reputation of soccer fans. But it quickly became clear this multiracial group was about fun, not drunken violence. As they went through their repertoire of TFC chants, the looks on the faces of the other passengers went from concern to amusement.

By the end of the half-hour ride to East 161st Street in the Bronx, the Reds' fans were trading jokes and smiles with people on the D train. It wasn't something you see from the jaded New Yorkers who ride the city's subway trains and it was certainly something you would never see from Toronto's reserved, even up-tight Leaf supporters.

It was what makes going to BMO Field for TFC games so much fun even for a soccer ignoramus. There is also evidence this enthusiasm is spreading as Blue Jays crowds, once as staid as the Leafs variety, seemed younger and noisier during the playoff runs of the past two years. If so, then not only are the city's teams getting better, so are its fans.

David Shoalts

When a journalist meets a star

I hadn't even landed in Rio yet when my first sports idol came into view. Gaël Monfils had long been one of my tennis favourites, a player as erratic as he was spectacular to watch, and here he was sans entourage near the departure gate at Miami International Airport.

What to do? Sports journalists are supposed to keep a kind of professional detachment from the athletes they cover; I, on the other hand, was on my first Olympic Games and had never covered so much as a pee-wee hockey match. In my reasoning, this freed me to behave like a star-struck 8-year-old.

"Bonjour," I said after walking up to Monfils, who is from Paris.

I told him I'd watched him play in Montreal, and, by the way, would he pose for a photo with me? One can never be sure how a professional athlete will respond. Monfils may have been jet-lagged off a flight from Charles de Gaulle. He may have been approached by 37 other random strangers asking for his time that day.

I held my breath.

"Oui, bien sûr," he said with a smile.

Monfils was about as gracious as a human being could be at 9:49 p.m. in a packed airport boarding area full of cranky people. And so, in my personal photo collection, I have a snap of Gaël Monfils and me seated side-by-side in MIA, me looking all the world like a delighted groupie.

Three weeks later at the end of the Olympics, I was visiting the Canadian Olympic Committee offices at the Rio media centre when two of Canada's gold-medal winners, Penny Oleksiak and Derek Drouin, walked in. By then, I'd become a paragon of journalistic composure. I politely wished the two congratulations.

What a mistake. I wish I'd dropped the pretense, told them they were awesome and begged them to take a selfie with me.

Ingrid Peritz

The night The Greatest died

I had just poured myself a drink, put my feet up and cracked a book when I learned Muhammad Ali had died.

Less than an hour into my only weekend getaway of the summer, the news of Ali's passing didn't catch me off guard, but it momentarily sent me back to work late that Friday.

A group of friends had rented a cottage near Bobcaygeon, Ont., for a few days. We arrived after dark, but instead of settling in, the first thing they did was head into town to the local legion for karaoke.

Seeing this as my only moment to enjoy the total silence of night, I stayed behind with the dog (a boxer named Mo) and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the lake.

The world knew Ali could pass any day, but it was still hard to digest reports that The Greatest was dead, which I first read on a cursory scroll through my Twitter feed.

With the news desk unstaffed at that hour, I dialled the on-call editor, Jim Sheppard, in order to get The Globe's coverage rolling. But the call kept failing, and it wasn't until I was down on the dock that I finally got passable cell service and called him again.

He was sleeping (it was the middle of the night, after all) so it took Sheppard a few seconds to register the news, but when he collected himself, he took it from there and allowed to me to continue my weekend.

After we hung up, I knew I had about an hour of alone time left, so I tried to run back through the Ali moments of my lifetime and only found one: His lighting of the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996. I was 10, and it was the first time I'd heard his name. Everyone on television was talking about it, so I knew it was a big deal.

Everything I learned about the man after that came from books, documentaries, newspapers, word of mouth and Hollywood. Those stories I read, heard and viewed didn't conjure an image of an athlete. To my childhood self, he was a superhero.

Jamie Ross

A grieving mother tries to hold it together

It was terribly, tragically ironic. A concerned mom raises her son in a neighbourhood near Detroit's violent core and watches him grow up to be a fine man, a Michigan State football star who had signed on to play for the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL.

Mylan Hicks, Renee Hill's son, was going to Canada, to a country proud of its non-violent ways. That's what Hill would tell her friends about Hicks; that he was in a safer place.

And then he was gunned down outside a Calgary bar. Murdered at 25.

Why do bad things happen to good people? No one can answer that. Hicks was trying to talk a gunman into a peaceful ending when he was killed. His loss wounded the Stampeders emotionally.

Relief came from an unexpected source – Hill. She flew to Calgary to be with the team, to see where her son lived and where he died. She could have been bitter about what had happened to her Mylan. She could have lashed out in pain and no one would have blamed her. Instead, she carried on with an unforgettable resolve. "It must have been his time," she said.

She gave special attention to Osagie Odiase, Hicks's closest friend on the team. The two shared a downtown apartment and would go out at night and take homeless people to dinner. Hill found solace in that. When I spoke with her at her home in Detroit, she said she had been on the phone quite often with Odiase. "He's taking it real hard," she explained.

As for her, she was "holding it together" for her family. Gracious and strong, Hill remains a woman of immaculate faith. She misses her son, but basks in his memory. It was easy to see how he grew up to be a fine man.

Allan Maki

McDavid lives up to the hype

Hockey practices are repetitive and dull.

Every so often, however, genius is revealed. Maybe it's because players feel more freedom to just be.

In the first week of September, the continent's best under-23 players (with a couple of omissions) could be found at Bell Centre preparing for the World Cup of Hockey.

Edmonton Oilers coach Todd McLellan wielded the whistle. He was conducting a three-on-three drill where a puck was flipped into the corner, recovered, then cycled down low, where the forward was meant to curl up around the goal and make a pass to the slot to the initial passer.

So far, so boring.

Until Oilers forward Connor McDavid – still a few days away from being appointed captain of Team North America, and a couple of weeks from earning the Oilers's 'C' – got hold of the puck behind the net.

At this point, the 19-year-old has a defenceman – might have been Jacob Trouba of the Winnipeg Jets, or perhaps Aaron Ekblad of the Florida Panthers, memory fails – draped on him like a bolt of Milanese suit-cloth.

He protects the puck, rounds the net and … somehow the defender is five feet behind him, and fading.

McDavid hasn't taken a stride or perceptibly even moved. His coverer, an elite hockey player remember, is frantically chopping up the ice to catch up.

It was astonishing, and very cool.

McDavid's singular skating is already the stuff of legend, so there were no raucous cheers, as sometimes happens when an NHL player displays a feat of strength or skill.

Mark Scheifele of the Jets, who has known McDavid since childhood, observed afterward he "glides faster than the rest of us skate."

He can't figure out exactly how and has yet to meet anyone who has.

Isn't that the definition of magic?

Sean Gordon

Durant warms up with a new chapter of his life

Tipoff was two hours away. Kevin Durant, in his first game as a Golden State Warrior, was on the court at Rogers Arena in Vancouver. The arena was mostly empty and Durant warmed up alone.

It was the start of October, the first exhibition game of the NBA season and the Warriors were playing the Toronto Raptors in a game to promote the league in Canada.

This was the start of a man's new life. Four months earlier, Durant had been on the cusp of his second NBA final, but he and the Oklahoma City Thunder suffered a gutting defeat at the hands of the Warriors. Then, as a free agent, he joined the Warriors, sparking an outrage in some quarters, as though it were somehow unjust to make such a choice. And, so, this was not an ordinary exhibition game: A bunch of U.S. reporters were in attendance to see Durant's debut with Steph Curry and company.

Durant, warming up, floated an array of shots, almost all of which hit. He is an imposing figure – standing 6-foot-11, a couple inches taller than his official listing – but warm, too. He has a soft voice and his touch on a basketball court evinces the appearance of effortlessness.

Sitting courtside, watching Durant work, I considered the span of a man's life, thinking about getting older, and about beginnings. I was in a contemplative mood. Durant had turned 28 two days before. I was 40 and had been married several weeks earlier. The next day, my wife and I were heading off on a honeymoon to Mexico City.

The best of sports, often, comes in the biggest moments. Remember this year's two all-time Game 7s, the NBA final in mid-June and the World Series in early November. But, for me, it is this quiet beginning that resonates: Kevin Durant at a new start and alone, getting in reps, putting up shots.

David Ebner

When the beards told the whole story

My 2016 memorable moment was more of an encounter than an actual event. It happened on the opening day of the NHL playoffs last spring, in the San Jose Sharks' visiting dressing room at the Staples Centre. The Sharks' Joe Thornton was passing through, but stopped to say hello and catch up.

Soon, my inquiring mind wanted to know about his lush growth of facial hair – almost ZZ Top-like – and so early in the playoff season. Thornton laughed and proceeded to go into great detail – about how he started growing his beard in December at Brent Burns's urging; how Burns (and Burns's barber) had taught him to maintain it with combs and oils; and how his appreciation for the NHL's playoff beard tradition dated to 1989, when a grizzled Lanny McDonald helped Calgary win the Stanley Cup. Helpfully, Thornton then beckoned Burns over – and Burns obligingly went into a long history of why he's worn a beard throughout his career.

Now picture Burns for a moment. He is a massive man, 6-foot-5, 230 pounds, covered in tattoos, with a missing front tooth. With that beard, he could have been cast as an extra in Deliverance. And yet Burns told the strangest tale – of how he grew a beard early in his career because it gave him greater confidence physically; and that whenever he shaved it off, he felt like a wimpy undersized kid. What a curiously illuminating anecdote.

As the Sharks unexpectedly made their way to the Stanley Cup final, Thornton and Burns were endlessly asked to discuss their playoff beards, and eventually grew tired of the telling. But that day they were like two giddy kids, giggling about how much their wives enjoyed the beards (they didn't at all), but understood why they grew them.

A frothy, fun moment in a long playoff run.

Eric Duhatschek