If you have followed sports in Toronto for any duration, you will have a favourite "That time the city broke a professional's spirit" story.
My go-to involves former Toronto FC coach John Carver.
Carver was a blunt, pragmatic fellow from Newcastle – similar to a stubby pencil in both appearance and utility. He had a rich history in the game of soccer. The team he took over, it is fair to say, did not.
Upon first mingling with the local rubes, he seemed delighted at how softly he'd landed. Then the sports began sportsing and things got bad in a hurry.
Carver could not understand why people hated him so much, so quickly. Why were they never happy? About anything.
To his mind, the city enjoyed the prospect of failure, if only so that it could blame someone for it.
In the middle of his first season, after another loss, Carver snapped in a postgame presser. We're not talking about a few intemperate words. We're talking snapping at a "get him down on the ground and where the hell is that sedative" level.
He came out waving around a sheaf of papers. He rambled about a conspiracy. He called people out by name. He read snippets aloud and asked the gallery to guess who'd written what. It was like the show trials for the Doctors' Plot, only in reverse and stupider.
In the end, Carver staggered into the locker room and slumped dejectedly in a stall like a lost hobo. For a moment, it seemed he was about to burst into tears.
At one point he shrieked, "Does Toronto want their teams to be successful? I'm asking you."
Well, no. That's what Carver didn't get. It's why the city temporarily ruined him.
(He would later return to manage his hometown club, Newcastle United, where a supporter was recently jailed for beating up a police horse. It must have been quite relaxing by comparison.)
This same sequence of events – stranger comes to town, is consumed by an abysmal culture of losing – has been playing out across the board in Toronto sports for many years now. It's the city's sporting raison d'être.
So what will the town do when it changes? Because, gradually, it is.
On Thursday, the Toronto Raptors handily won a road playoff game against the Indiana Pacers, only their fifth such victory in 20 years of existence. What was remarkable about it was how unremarkable it seemed in the moment.
Five years ago, the idea that this basketcase franchise could so dominate one of the steady ships of the NBA would have been laughable. Now, suddenly, the Raptors aren't just good. They're predictably, confidently good. And not during some spurt in the regular season, when it doesn't matter. In the NBA's second season, which has always been uncharted territory, full of monsters.
At one point in the game, after another Pacer had got another technical, a fan chucked a small, souvenir ball onto the court, where it pinged coach Dwane Casey in the head.
Five years ago, most of Toronto would've seen that live, got up from their couches, gone out to their cars and seriously considered coming down here to do something about it. (And then gone back to their couches to whine on the Internet about how no one respects us.)
Never mind that they'd pooched O Canada in the pregame.
Instead, the only thing you felt in the moment was pity. Indianapolis was being driven mad by the point where athletic ineptitude meets fate. Nobody understands that emotional intersection better than Toronto.
Afterward, acknowledging that no coach anywhere should ever be happy unless he's got a trophy in his hands, Casey was asked where he stood on the happiness meter.
"Very low. Very, very low," he said, and then wandered off to nitpick on the number of fouls given up.
Toronto, this is what triumphalism looks like. You thought it only went as far north as Boston, but it's began to seep up here as well. Like people saying "y'all" or Asian carp.
Barring the most Toronto collapse in Toronto's long history of collapses, this series ended with 5:26 remaining in the fourth quarter, after Kyle Lowry hit a leaning three as the shot clock sounded. That put Toronto up by 19 and put the Indiana Pacers in their place. That's when they were forced to acknowledge that they are second best in a two-horse race.
I am genuinely curious to see how Toronto reacts to a series win. Surely, it won't be the same elemental feeling that swept the city last October after the Blue Jays finally won something that mattered. There's only so much catharsis a city can experience before it veers into bathos.
Instead, the perpetually aggrieved among us will be confronted by a frightening new reality – that while Toronto still hasn't won anything tangible, it's no longer a city of across-the-board losers.
The Raptors and Jays are respectable. The Leafs no longer operate like they're staging a revival of The Producers. It's all very discombobulating.
There was something comforting in the idea that nothing works out for the Toronto fan. It made watching sports a safe place, free of the vagaries of hope. You knew what to expect and were therefore impervious to disappointment. The reason nobody outside the city can ever land a decent "Toronto blows" joke is that the locals always beat you to it.
If that's out the window, we have to think up a new way of doing business.
It isn't going to happen all at once. There is too much residual disappointment. If there is a championship calibre team in the bunch, they have yet to prove it.
What comes next is a period of adjustment, and not just for the viewers.
From now on, the teams don't get the old "Well, what did you expect?" mulligans. They've changed expectations. That's a slippery slope, but everyone is going to expect them to slide up the hill. That may only break the jobbing pros in a different way.
Follow me on Twitter: @cathalkelly