When Masai Ujiri was named the new general manager of the Toronto Raptors almost three years ago to the day, he was careful about making promises.
"I want to put a product out there that's going to compete one day for a championship," Ujiri told reporters. "Sometimes it's going to be tough. Sometimes it's going to be hard, but overall, we're in a good place."
Everyone heard the "tough" and "hard" parts. If you were to construct the ur-Toronto sports fan in a computer, he'd be born with his heart outside his chest and the words "Born to Lose" tattooed across his forehead.
For the same reasons, the "good place" bit was difficult to credit. It's the sort of thing you have to say, even if you're doing it while armpit deep in competitive quicksand. That's where the Raptors were at the time and Ujiri knew it.
That's what makes where we've arrived so cognitively difficult to connect back to 2013. Despite the obstacles, Ujiri did what he said he'd do. Repeat: a sports executive employed in Toronto for guaranteed money did his job. This team may never have had a real chance, but they competed for a championship.
The Raptors lost 113-87 on Friday night to the Cleveland Cavaliers and were eliminated from the playoffs. They were beaten from distance by Cleveland three pointers and from up close by some atrocious officiating. Kyle Lowry had one of the great sequences in franchise history – 12 points in 95 seconds to end the third quarter, single-handedly clawing Toronto back into it. For just a moment, it seemed possible. But it wasn't.
An important note – no one was cheated here. The Cavaliers were just better.
It's right to be disappointed. It's okay to hate the refs. But it would be wrong to call it a failure. It's the opposite of that.
When you get to the playoffs, the view tightens. Every game is its own world. Everything that happens is a sign of something either ominous or auspicious (but usually neither).
Unused as we are to this process, the emotional swings become a little exaggerated. Or more than a little. Okay, enough to require a few hard slaps.
Maybe the Raptors don't need to trade Kyle Lowry and maybe Bismack Biyombo is not Bill Russell reincarnated. We got a little carried away. It happens.
Now that it's over, the camera can pan back a bit.
After 21 years, the Raptors finally delivered. One series victory would have been enough. Two was seismic. Pushing the Cavs to six games was – and this is meant in its breezy sporting context – heroic.
Two months ago, this franchise was still widely considered a potential embarrassment to its fans and a running joke to everyone else. Around the time they were handing Cleveland its collective head last week, that ended. People will continue to overlook the Raptors, but they have stopped being an ESPN punch line.
They were never going to win this series. Not because they aren't good enough (which they aren't), but because they've never been here before. The Cavaliers – and LeBron James in particular – have learned how to win at this stage. Almost none of the Raptors had the benefit of that wisdom. They may now, but that's for next year.
What's for right now is enjoying a job marvellously done. It was occasionally choppy, but it's a results business. It's about winning rather than sticking landings, and they won.
Lowry and DeMar DeRozan proved themselves to be something more than regular-season stars. Coach Dwane Casey earned a lengthy extension and will at least double his salary. Just about every player on the team has, to one extent or another, burnished his reputation.
But that isn't the most salutary thing.
This was a success so rousing it may have permanently altered the basketball landscape in this country. As in, created one.
It has become popular in the last couple of years to put basketball up beside hockey and say, "Here's the new top man."
People like the idea of change and revolutions are sexy. Che Guevara wore a beret and did some pretty awful things and we still put him on T-shirts. That's how cool overthrowing the old order can be.
But the story was more hopeful than likely. Basketball had never broken through to an audience beyond the Greater Toronto city limits.
Two years ago, no Raptors game had ever drawn a TV audience larger than one million. The NHL hits that number every Saturday night.
Basketball was well above it for most of the last month. The Raptors set a new viewing record every time they took the court. They probably touched two million on Friday. If we apply the brush very roughly, that means the NBA has doubled its domestic audience in the lasts two years. Doubled.
It's proof you can't market your way to popularity. At some point you have to win. They finally did.
This wasn't an NBA effort or the LeBron James effect. It was non-aesthetes buying into Canada's team. By extension, they bought into the sport.
The tail of that effect will be long. That basketball world some of us have spent a while trying to make happen by talking about it? It's here now.
On the local front, the Raptors have also altered expectations for everyone else. Their shocking burst of confidence could unsettle all order on the Toronto sports scene.
What if everybody starts doing what they say they'll do, instead of making an expanding series of panic trades and then waiting for someone to cut them a severance cheque? What then?! The people who run teams here know that shifting personnel is easy, but shifting expectations is not. You get paid the same either way.
Now, there's a new expectation.
Because if the Raptors – the choking, shiftless, self-destructive Raptors – can figure out a way to turn themselves into a winner, what's your excuse?
Cathal Kelly