On Wednesday some of the city was briefly turned into a lovestruck 13-year-old. A little more than two weeks after the Toronto Raptors championship parade, Kawhi Leonard was back in town to meet with the team as part of his Waiting For Godot approach to free agency. And the city went a little nuts.It was a measure of the joy and pride and at-times embarrassing fever that has boiled over here after Toronto won the NBA title three weeks ago. Kawhi, of course, is a free agent. He is deciding between the Raptors, the Los Angeles Clippers and perhaps even the Los Angeles Lakers. The city had millions in the streets for the championship parade, and millions more watched the clincher on TV. So Kawhi’s arrival was tracked by amateur flight enthusiasts. CP24’s helicopter filmed the deplaning and followed the black SUVs all the way to Yorkville, narrating this bizarro O.J. Simpson chase as they went. Crowds had formed outside a hotel where team president Masai Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster had breakfast. TV cameras were set up outside. Nobody outside the hotel absolutely saw Kawhi and the meeting was apparently not there, but that didn’t stop reporters from producing TV clips and newspaper quotes that will age into hilarious time capsules of a slightly embarrassing, if probably harmless civic mania. Man Recorded Man Whom He Thinks Was Kawhi On A Balcony. Woman Came With Dog To See If Kawhi Has A Dog, And To See How Tall He Really Is. (He is six-foot-seven.) You know those old clips that get dug up 25 years later and you laugh at everything about them? Well, it’s a renewable resource. Read more:Opinion | Doug Smith : Kawhi Leonard could be taking the long road to a short-term deal with the RaptorsOpinion | Bruce Arthur: Toronto needs to channel its inner Kawhi, be cool, and leave the poor man aloneNews helicopter stalks van, believed to contain Kawhi Leonard, leaving Pearson airportIt was a little much. As mentioned here last week, this ci ...
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