Fan or not, this is what happens to a city when your team makes the playoffs

Maybe you’ve been a die-hard Jays fan these long years since their last run at the World Cup in 1993. Maybe you’re a bandwagoner. Maybe you hardly noticed that the Toronto Blue Jays clinched a playoff spot this year. Either way, you’ve heard the news to some degree.

And no matter if you’re a Jays fan or not, there’s something that happens when your city’s team makes the playoffs, whether it’s baseball, hockey (not likely to happen here in TO anytime soon), basketball or football.

Already, the atmosphere downtown TO is infectious. It’s weird, because not everyone in Toronto will have their eyes glued to the TV these next few weeks. But, for the next while during the playoff run, guaranteed that most of us will become at least part-time Jays fans, at least to some degree.

Living in a major city, there’s a vibe that becomes infectious when a team makes a playoff run – especially one as rare as the Jays’. People talk about it. There are noticeably more blue jerseys on the streets. The bars are busier. People talk about the Jays at work, on the phone and on the bus. Normally, many of us wouldn’t care. But now we do.

Maybe this playoff run is kind of like a common cause that we’re all rallying behind – even if we really can’t do anything to affect the outcome. Still, we all feel that we’re part of something – a movement, a mission, a goal. And we know that “something” is temporary, which definitely helps.

No matter how far the Jays get, the city will rally behind them while the run continues. People who normally don’t care will get hyped about playoff talk.

Then, if it ends badly, you can bet many of those same people will jeer the Jays and shake their heads at how unlikely the whole thing was.

But, if it ends with a World Series win, that pulse will go on – for some, for a couple of days; for others, a few weeks; and for a few, for months – until we get back to the daily grind and forget that, for a time, we were part of something big, something awesome, something meaningful. And we were all in it together.