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“Cheering for the Blue Jays makes you a proud Canadian. And what is not to like? They are our team, and we don’t have another one.”

‘There is no shame in cheering for the Blue Jays’

We used to have another one, in Montreal, and in Montreal the Jays will forever generate mixed feelings. Some of those feelings will be warm and fuzzy, others not so much.

Matthew Ross is a communications professional and founder of ExposNation, a non-profit “seeking to promote the Montreal market as a viable baseball market.” He hopes to resurrect the Expos and describes himself as a “hardliner” when it comes to rooting, or rather not rooting, for the Jays. Toronto, remember, shamefully voted to contract (translation: kill) the Expos as they lurched toward insolvency in November 2001.

“I view Toronto like I do the Leafs,” Ross says. He means he would rather be duct-taped to a lamp pole than cheer for them. But even he admits some Montrealers have succumbed to Jays fever, especially now, and especially since the team’s burly, bearded catcher, Russell Martin, spent part of his childhood in Montreal.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, the hype around the ball club is creating some awkward situations for Arron Barberian, a self-described Jays super-fan. How super? He took his six-day-old daughter, Maddy, to the team’s 1999 home opener, because his wife had to duck into the office for a bit.

“I don’t remember too much about that game,” he says. He reckons he has been to about 1,200 games over the years, watching most from his seat over the visitors’ dugout. Barberian saw all the good times, and the bad, and now people — friends, acquaintances and business contacts — are asking him baseball questions and if he can get them some tickets after not asking him about the Jays for 20-plus years.

“It kind of ticks me off,” Barberian says. “If you are going to be a fan, be a fan always.”

Or else hop on the Jays bandwagon, if you must, just to experience what it feels like to be in a Toronto where baseball is king, again, at long last, and where the wins come in bunches and the question buzzing on people’s lips is, “Can you believe those Jays?”

Well, can you?

National Post

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