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Now it's all taken for granted.

Toronto FC effectively sells out its entire inaugural season in Major League Soccer. Tickets for the under-20 World Cup matches at BMO Field in Toronto have been almost all snapped up, as have 55,000 seats for the opening doubleheader at Montreal's Olympic Stadium.

When Toronto striker Danny Dichio sprained his ankle last week, it was played like real sports news in the local press, with the understanding that plenty of people knew who he is, knew what role he plays and were concerned about the outcome of his magnetic resonance imaging test.

Thursday night, when Canada plays the United States in the semi-final of the CONCACAF Gold Cup tournament in Chicago, perhaps the country won't be holding its collective breath at the outcome. But there's no denying a growing awareness that the men's senior national team, during the lead-in to World Cup qualifying, is starting to show signs of life.

And in a few weeks, when David Beckham arrives with the Los Angeles Galaxy, it will be the biggest sports and sports-media event of the summer in Toronto.

Soccer – “soccerball,” as The Guardian derisively refers to the North American variant of the world game – has achieved a critical mass in Central Canada that, a year ago, the usual naysayers would have claimed was impossible.

Think back to what was being said and written just a few months back:

That the MLS was a minor league by definition that would never sell in the Great Metropolis, where anything other than the biggest and best has always struggled, just as the MLS has struggled to find an audience in some of its U.S. markets.

That the various pockets of ethnic soccer support would stick to their long-distance, Old World allegiances and turn up their noses at anything less than AC Milan or Manchester United.

That Toronto FC would be lucky to draw 10,000 fans a game, and its players would be just as anonymous in the city as those of the American Hockey League's Marlies.

That the stadium, constructed with large doses of public money, would soon become a white elephant.

That the under-20 tournament, no big deal in the more soccer-mad parts of the planet, would die a terrible, embarrassing death in Canada.

That you just can't sell soccer here because you never could, because all of those soccer-playing kids and their parents don't translate into ticket-buying soccer fans. Remember what happened to the North American Soccer League, and they had Pele and Georgie Best.

And by the way, Beckham is washed up in any case.

So far, every bit of that conventional wisdom has been proved wrong, and all of those old assumptions have proved to be out of date, including the premature reports of Beckham's demise as a world-class footballer.

It was interesting this week to chart the reaction to Alexi Lalas, the former American international who now runs the Galaxy, and his rather outrageous suggestion that the MLS is effectively on a par with the English Premiership.

Even those who believe the Premier League a bit overhyped would never go that far. (Though you can certainly understand Lalas's frustration with the remarkably smug chauvinism of the English sports press.) But rather than taking what Lalas said as an opportunity to slag the domestic game as inferior, for the most part the soccer crowd, old and new, understood that it was an apples and oranges comparison – the MLS is what we've got, it's plenty entertaining and that's enough.

That's a huge, healthy change in mindset from once upon a time, when the soccer hard core here enjoyed their cultish, insider status and weren't anxious to welcome the great unwashed. And it's a reflection of all of those new fans who caught the bug while watching European games and World Cup action on television and now are flocking to buy tickets to see the sport live.

It's been quite the shift in perception, a dream spring for those who always believed that it could work.

Now add one last piece of the puzzle: a Canadian side in the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, creating a true national rooting interest, in addition to all of those other blood ties.

Imagine how that would play out.