Not just the Raptors: The other champions of Toronto
'90s Blue Jays took World Series twice and Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup four times in the '60s
"It's a feeling you really can't put in words, to describe how you feel about being part of a ... championship team," said a player on the winning Toronto squad.
"It's a part of history. It's history in the making, it puts Canada on the map," said a fan.
They weren't talking about the 2018-2019 Toronto Raptors, but the 1992 Toronto Blue Jays.
And the CBC's Paul Hunter was reporting on the Jays winning baseball's World Series in Atlanta for CBC's Sunday Report.
"It was like the party never ended in Toronto. Delirious baseball fans," he said, introducing a report that found fans awaiting the victorious team's arrival the next morning at Pearson Airport.
Hunter recapped the thrilling moment when the Jays clinched the win and the camera showed the beer-soaked dressing room party afterwards.
The party started at SkyDome
Inside SkyDome, the Jays' home field, some 45,000 fans had gathered to watch their team on the JumboTron.
And when Joe Carter made a play at first base to get the runner out, those fans spilled onto the SkyDome turf to begin the celebration.
And then the jubilation really got underway, in Toronto and beyond.
"Half a million fans paraded through Toronto's streets after the game," said Hunter, as the camera showed crowds on Yonge Street.
In Winnipeg and Vancouver, too, crowds gathered to celebrate.
The scene in Toronto was similar in 1993, when the Jays won the World Series again.
(Although, it must be noted, Torontonians were less enthusiastic the second time the Jays were in the World Series final.)
The real Maple Leafs parade route
Further back in time, the Toronto Maple Leafs won hockey's biggest prize four times in the 1960s, in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1967.
The last time they won was also the last year before the league expanded to 12 teams from six.
And if fans took to the streets in a spontaneous celebration on any of those four occasions, the CBC archives have no record of it.
Before 1962, the Leafs had endured an 11-year Stanley Cup drought.
The Toronto Star reported that year that the city's airport was "jammed with people" who were there to greet the team as they returned from Chicago.
And the newspaper said an estimated 50,000 people, "many of them school children on holiday," turned out to watch the parade that followed.
Leafs players including captain George Armstrong were showered by ticker tape as they rode in convertibles along Bay Street in the city's financial district before they were publicly congratulated by mayor Nathan Phillips.
A ticker tape parade up Bay Street was repeated in 1963 and in 1964, as seen in the video above.
It was getting tired by 1967
In 1967, the fourth win in six years, the by-then familiar celebration wound up at Toronto's new City Hall.
"However, the over-all crowd, estimated between 20,00-25,000, was the smallest to attend a Cup celebration," noted the Toronto Star.
Mayor William Dennison publicly presented an engraved gold watch commemorating the victory to Armstrong, the first of a set for the whole team.
It seems unlikely that anyone watching expected it would be 25 and 26 years before a city sports team won another big international league championship.
And it would be 26 years after that before the Raptors would make history by bringing the NBA championship to Canada.
