Toronto FC won its final game of the regular season on Sunday, 3-2 over the Chicago Fire, sending it into the playoffs on a – here's a first – high note.
It will play the Philadelphia Union at home in a midweek knockout game.
Every postseason matters to every team, but few have mattered so much to any particular one. This is another of Toronto FC's last chances to spread the message beyond the diehards.
"[Head coach] Greg [Vanney] said something about it at the start of this week – this can be our city now," defender Drew Moor said earlier in the week. "We want this city to be red."
That's doubtful. Not to start, at least. Toronto FC shares the same problem of most Major League Soccer teams – it has a few thousand committed fans, and all of them are at the games.
Ten feet outside the perimeter of the stadium, this team is a non-entity on the Toronto sports scene.
Toronto FC has only itself to blame. Two playoff games (including the one still to come) in 10 years of existence will tend to tamp down excitement. It remains a remarkable opportunity missed.
When Toronto FC started in 2007, the team did so amid what might have been the most downbeat moment in the city's sports history. The Maple Leafs, Blue Jays and Raptors were not just bad, they were boring. Predictably, helplessly and hopelessly boring.
You could not see light at any one of those teams for all the murk surrounding their futures. It was a difficult time to care about anything sports-wise.
Toronto FC shrugged off that malaise, here and abroad.
In those early days, playing in a league that was being slowly crushed by apathy elsewhere, Toronto was suddenly a city that mattered.
MLS executives were rushing north with regularity to point out all the things Toronto had done right – the new soccer-specific stadium situated in the downtown core, the Euro feel to its fandom, the low-price tickets and ambitious marketing at young professionals.
It is fair to say that, however far the league has come in 10 years, Toronto FC is the catalyst for a great deal of it. Toronto FC showed everyone the proper way of running a soccer team. Everything except the "soccer" part of it.
In Year 1, the quality of the roster hardly mattered. Toronto FC didn't score its first goal until a month into the season. Nobody minded.
Brand-new teams have the freedom to be the Bad News Bears. In fact, people seem to like it. It lets them prove their true-blue bonafides up front. They'll show up for a loser at the outset, but they won't do it forever.
Back then, a Toronto FC game was an event. It helped that tickets were both hard to get and cheap once you found them. (They are neither any more.)
The Leafs and Raptors were big arena rock shows. TFC was the Stones at the El Mocambo. Getting in wasn't a function of paying through the nose. It was a being-in-the-know sort of thing. People love being in the know.
Considering the attention span of the average 21st-century urbanite, that sense of a secret everyone wanted in on lasted a long time.
Back then, when it was all still possible, the club was repeatedly entrusted to a series of European charlatans who ran it like a failed state. Every new regime had to start over. Every single one of them got it horribly wrong. Long before Aron Winter – ("He must be good at this. He's Dutch!") – was warring with his players over whether they could wear flip-flops at the team hotel, it had got farcical.
No one likes being part of a farce. The casual fan began drifting away.
The arrival of Jermain Defoe was a pick-me-up. By the time that malingerer had fled the city, the momentary buoyancy he'd provided only made the return to Earth farther to fall and the landing harder.
Though nothing changed at Toronto FC, things were changing around it.
The Raptors got good, hiving off the hipsters who'd underpinned Toronto FC's base. The Jays got good, taking away everyone else. Even if they're not yet good, the Leafs got smarter and more interesting.
Though Toronto FC had never been in the top three in the pecking order, it has never been so far behind the pack. Every time the team fails, it's lapped.
While that happens, Toronto FC is wasting the prime of Sebastian Giovinco, the greatest player in the history of the MLS.
(One can only imagine the ambivalent feelings he elicits for the few people at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment who really care about soccer. His presence highlights all the things they did wrong.)
But there are glimmers of hope.
If the Jays had made the World Series, the MLS playoffs would be occurring within a black hole. The end of local baseball creates an opening through which light might pass.
The Raptors begin their season on Wednesday, but there's nothing new and shiny about that team. The Leafs are intriguing, but they're also losing.
There is a small wedge in the schedule that Toronto FC can exploit.
Toronto FC won't do it with one win. Or even with two. But if it is on its way to a conference championship, that could be enough to bring back the jaded supporter who gave up a few years back. Going beyond that just might be the excuse to get them painting the town. Toronto has proved in the past that it likes winners more than it likes any sport in particular.
But blow it early and we're back to square (minus-) one. Toronto FC will have confirmed everyone's opinion of it – that its only purpose is to absorb all the negative energy in a town emerging from its Age of Sports Darkness.
It shouldn't be thought of as pressure. Toronto FC can't get much lower than it has already been. Instead, it's another of its umpteen opportunities. Maybe the team will finally take one of them.
Cathal Kelly