It felt like the end.
Not just the end of the season, but the end of everything. Yesterday’s 0-0 draw with Montreal – a game that neither team appeared able to win – was an afterthought at the end of a week that had already delivered a fatal blow to the hearts of most local fans.
All that’s really left now is to bury the body and move on.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
The season isn’t actually over. I suspect if you asked 100 fans leaving BMO Field yesterday if there were more games to play, 80 would have said no. What was once an obsessive passion has become a bad joke, irrelevant to all but a few masochists.
It will be five months before we stand in the stadium again. We all need the break.
At half-time yesterday I took a walk around the stadium and up to King Street. I was struck by how quiet it was.
In the early days a TFC game was all encompassing. There was an excitement that stretched from King and Dufferin and all the way through Liberty Village. It felt like we were all a part of something and that we were reprehensive of a new, bold and proud type of Torontonian.
I remember walking into bars after the games with a group of people wearing TFC gear. We drew attention. People wanted to know what the games were like and told us that they wanted to go to a game to see it themselves.
It didn’t matter if they were urban hipsters, Bay Street lawyers or suburban moms at Starbucks, TFC was relevant. It was part of the city and it seemed like the buzz would never die.
Six years later you wouldn’t have known that there was a game on 100 feet from the stadium.
When Toronto was awarded a franchise in 2006 there were lots of voices that suggested that it would never fly – that the game had failed in the city before (which was actually untrue. The NASL Blizzard never folded) and that TFC was a doomed venture. They were wrong. It succeeded (off the pitch) in spectacular ways.
However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many who came in the early days were not buying into the club, but rather the experience. Now that the experience is gone they are too.
TFC management built a brand, not a football club.
It’s hard to imagine a crowd at BMO being excited again. I’m not even sure winning would bring back the buzz – not without it being sustained for several years anyway.
Whatever TFC was is probably dead. For those that still care, we can only hope that something with more substance emerges from its ashes.