Saskatchewan Roughriders fans cheer their team during first quarter CFL Western semi-final football action against the B.C.Lions in Regina, Sask., Sunday, Nov. 14, 2010.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Here they come again, the people in green.
Grey Cup is different when the Saskatchewan Roughriders are involved. Different because they are the most passionately followed sports franchise in this country, different because they can inspire mass migration.
When Riders fans get the chance to support their heroes in the big game, they embrace it in a way that other followers of Canadian football do not. They get into their cars, they get into planes, they descend on the host city and paint it in the team colours, and God love them for it.
Too rare are the chances, in sport and elsewhere, to enjoy something that hasn't been choreographed.
The Grey Cup is perfectly designed to embrace them, to allow them to make the week their own, because it remains remarkably friendly to the ordinary fan. Unlike the Super Bowl, here the high-roller crowd is peripheral and anyone who can get themselves to town and is willing to fight the lines can spend a night at the Spirit of Edmonton or Riderville or Tiger Town, where they're almost certain to rub shoulders with some of the stars of the CFL game past and present.
That said, the travelling part of that mob is pretty much fixed and defined and familiar, a loyal group that comes every year, no matter which teams are the combatants, that buys tickets and secures hotel rooms months in advance.
There is a smattering of others who decide to make the trip only when they know their favourite team is going to be involved. But that's a trickle except in one case - when it's the Riders, what you get is a flood.
And when the game is being played on a province that borders their own - well, everyone knows what it's like because it has happened before, in 1997, when an underdog Saskatchewan team played the Toronto Argonauts in Edmonton, and last year, when the Riders' home fans merged with the diaspora in Calgary and all but took over the town.
This new wave of Rider-mania at first glance seems to fly in the face of the way the larger culture is evolving. In the 500 TV channel, content-on-demand, perpetual-availability world, where it would stand to reason that hometown loyalties might begin to break down, the Riders are more beloved by Saskatchewanians who live at home, and who live elsewhere, than they have ever been, even than in the glory days of Ron Lancaster and George Reed.
(It wasn't so long ago, remember, that a telethon was needed to save the club.)
It's a passion that comes without the underlying note of cynicism so familiar with, say, Toronto Maple Leafs supporters, who have trouble believing they share common cause with profit-driven ownership. The Riders are of the community, for the community, there is no us and them, so to live and die with their successes and failures is as pure a relationship as there is in pro sport.
Tribal traditions, in some places, in some cases, die hard - or perhaps more accurately, when you start erasing lines, erasing borders, one impulse is to embrace more fervently those things that remind you of who you are, of where you come from, of where is your place in the world.
Need evidence beyond the packed houses at Regina's Mosaic Stadium? Well, there is the bump in attendance every CFL team experiences when the Roughriders visit, and there are those startling television numbers, including a couple of records set this year when Saskatchewan was involved - all the more remarkable when you consider the province's population hovers around one million.
On Nov. 14, the Saskatchewan-British Columbia Lions game drew approximately twice as many viewers as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats versus Toronto, two teams based in the most populous area of the country. Last Sunday's Saskatchewan-Calgary Stampeders West Division final drew another huge audience, far greater than that for the East game.
And there was also that beautiful summer afternoon last July, at Moose Jaw's wonderful Festival of Words, when a crowd - mostly older, most female - was drawn indoors to listen to readings.
The Roughriders were playing at the same time, and the minute the program was finished, a whole bunch of folks who looked like your mom dashed for the door, turned on their cellphones and called someone they could trust.
Walking with them down the street, you could hear the same question being asked over and over again: "What's the score? What's the score?"