On belonging

I’ve just gotten home from watching the men’s gold medal game at a pub in the northwest part of the city. My heart rate, which usually runs somewhat concerningly slow had been pounding for the better part of three hours. I feel spent as though I had done something far more strenuous than drinking coffee and eating some fries while watching hockey.

The outcome, as you know by now was not a win for the good guys (or it was depending on where you’re reading this). I of course knew this was a possibility but somehow didn’t believe it was. Team Canada had so many chances in the first three periods to decisively put the game out of reach but fell short every time. It was the tensest I’ve been for a sporting event (since Friday, when the women played for gold and also lost to the US).

Toronto, thankfully has been forged in fire when it comes to losing. We have bathed in it. We are seasoned in it. We expect it. And even if we deny it, we often embrace it.

Ironically, I am a fairweather fan when it comes to hockey. I don’t follow the Leafs or the Sceptres until they’re in the playoffs. But I am an absolute obsessive when it comes to the Olympics. For two weeks every two years, I watch with a fervour that should really only be reserved for athletes, their coaches and loved ones. More than half the time I have no idea what I’m even watching, but that has zero impact on my level of intensity.

The women’s gold medal game, like all the other hockey games had been played while I was at work. If Canada made the final, I was determined to watch in its entirety. With friends, but mostly with strangers.

I still remember where I was in 2010, when Sid the Kid scored the golden goal in the Whistler Olympics, and the last one on Canadian soil. I had been working at the International Home Show, and the game played on the closing Sunday. All of us abandoned our booths (enterprising people could have walked away with all the marble bathtubs and whirlpool appliances they could carry) to watch in the Rogers ‘recharge station’. It’s hard to explain the feeling when that puck went in. Only that’s it’s a collective joy that once you’ve experienced, you always hope to replicate.

Back then when I took the subway home, people were cheering and high fiving the entire way. I exited to a Yonge Street that had been closed off for a street party. Honking horns, Canadian flags and endless hugs from strangers. It was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve had here.

On Tuesday night, my friend and I went to see Nirvanna: The Band - the Show - the Movie. Initially a web series, it somehow became a feature length film nearly two decades after it launched.

The theatre was full of university students off for reading week. At the end, they burst into applause and an eventual standing ovation. My friend was surprised. Not to spoil the film, but much of it takes place in 2008, when most of these kids were far too young to remember anything.

I thought the reaction post-film was because it created a similar sense of belonging. This movie, unlike so many others filmed in Toronto, actually takes place here. It is an unabashed and unapologetic love story to the city. It tells us that it’s okay to feel proud of Toronto. That it’s okay to love a city that is equal parts welcoming and passive-aggressive. A place that so many insist sees itself as ‘the centre of the universe’, and yet I’ve never once heard anyone from here claim or demand that. That even if you weren’t old enough to remember Toronto in 2008, it’s still an experience you can feel is yours too.

There’s this sentiment again on the streetcar as I make my way home after the game. We aren’t celebrating together this time, but we’re commiserating with just as much inclusion, and dare I say: affection. Strangers giving useless port-mortems to each other about a game that could have been completely lopsided but instead ended crushingly for the Canadian squad. Agonizing over the what-ifs until their stop arrives. Shaking their heads. ‘What are you going to do?’

Because we are well-trained in the art of coming up short. We accept it ruefully with sighs and shrugs, and then we take it in our stride. I feel that same sense of pride I did after the movie. This is my city. And we are for the most part, good at losing.

And really, like every other sport I watch. Like every other heartbeat that rests on the outcomes, they were of course never mine to own in the first place.

I’m walking home from the subway and the wet snow that’s been falling all morning has made the sidewalks slick and slippery. A woman nearly plows into me, her nose buried in her phone and I feel a familiar annoyance rise. The spell is broken.

But then she offers a sincere ‘sorry’, so I reply, ‘no worries.’ The guy to the right of me spies my Baseball Canada tuque and says, ‘tough game.’ I shrug, ‘what are you going to do’. He shrugs back with a laugh. “Nothing…be careful, it’s slippery out.”

“Thanks, you too. Have a good one.”