There are murals of Kawhi Leonard sprouting up all over the city and the curtain at the ballet has a Raptors logo and “We the North” projected on it and people started camping out to watch Monday night’s game five in Jurassic Park by Saturday morning.Every coffee shop you walk into, every street sandwich board you pass, every cab you take, every elevator you stand in, people are talking about basketball. Hyped about it. Obsessing about it.This is the Raptors’ town right now, and we all get to live in it, but in case you somehow missed it:ONE! WIN! AWAY!The Toronto Raptors are one (!) win (!) away (!) from being NBA Champions — and get up to three chances to finish it off after taking a 3-1 lead in the best of seven series Friday — and this city is ready to explode in love and anticipation and the exhilaration of the ride.Before this series between the Raptors and the heavily presumed favourite Golden State Warriors began, I read a preview at The Athletic that wondered if Toronto would be just happy to be here in the final, in this company, after all this time. And hell yeah, we’re happy to be here.There was a point in Game 4 on Friday night in the third quarter, as the Raptors took over the game and put a stranglehold on the series, when you could hear chants of “Let’s Go Raptors” on the TV broadcast from Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif. And anyone who’s been in Toronto through this playoff run could reasonably wonder if perhaps the crowds watching in Jurassic Park and at outdoor venues across the GTA and Canada had reached such a pitch that they could be picked up by microphones across the continent. (Of course, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, that wasn’t exactly the case — it was thousands of Raptors fans who’d travelled to “take over” the arena in what could turn out to be the last NBA game ever played there, dancing and singing “O Canada” into ...
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