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In short, this weekend only, you can pay to see the Vancouver Grizzlies, and you can get decked out, head-to-toe, in Vancouver Grizzlies gear at a nearby store. You’d think there was a game on — and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

As it happens, there is an NBA game in Vancouver this weekend, as the Toronto Raptors do battle with the Portland Trail Blazers at Rogers Arena on Sunday night. It’ll do, but it doesn’t feel entirely right. With all this Grizzlies nostalgia in the air, cheering on their one-time Naismith Cup rivals, who now boast “We the North” because they’re the only Canadian NBA team left, is always a little depressing.

But still. That’s a lot of basketball in one weekend for a city that hasn’t had an NBA franchise since 2001. Was this intentional?

Not at all.

“It wasn’t some master plan — a huge kind of Grizzlies-inspired weekend,” said Vancity Original’s Jeff Martin.

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“It’s a perfect storm. We wanted to do a collab to kind of bring back the Grizzlies, so to speak, and we planned to do it right before the NBA promo game (…) And then we met Kat, who’s doing the Finding Big Country documentary at the Vancouver International Film Fest.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising when one person’s Grizzlies nostalgia overlaps with another’s. After all, a whole generation of Vancouver children loved and lost this team, and now they’ve all grown up.

“When you’re seven years old, you don’t realize that things like this can happen, that the Grizzlies can move to a whole ’nother city,” said social media personality Tunji Taylor-Lewis, who was outside the event, running the pop-up shop Pop-A-Shot.