Two hours before tip-off of Raptors home games in the early 2000s, public-address announcer Herbie Kuhn sat courtside as he organized his notes. Oftentimes, between perfecting the pronunciation of opposing players’ names, Kuhn glanced up to find a scrawny middle-schooler heaving 3-point shots.

“For some reason,” Kuhn said, “most of them would go in.”

That preteen was Stephen Curry, the eldest of Toronto guard Dell Curry’s three children. Kuhn couldn’t have known then that he’d call Stephen’s name almost two decades later in the NBA Finals. Fresh off leading the Kevin Durant-less Warriors to a sweep of Portland in the Western Conference finals, Curry is poised to return to the city where he first flashed his revolutionary range.

Although Curry considers Charlotte, N.C., his hometown, he still has an affinity for Toronto. That’s where he spent half of seventh grade and all of eighth grade while Dell finished his NBA career with the Raptors. Stephen’s wife, Ayesha, is from the Toronto suburb of Markham.

In the 18 or so months that Stephen lived full time in Toronto with his parents and two younger siblings, he came to appreciate the city’s diversity. His friends at the now-closed Queensway Christian College spanned numerous ethnic groups. While walking the Air Canada Centre’s concourses during Raptors games, Curry sometimes heard a half-dozen different languages.

None of Curry’s trips back to Toronto is complete without stocking up on Maynards Fuzzy Peach, sugar-sanded gummies popular in Canada. This candy holds special significance to Curry: When Ayesha visited family in Toronto in high school, she often brought back bags of Maynards Fuzzy Peach to give to Stephen — a friend from her Charlotte-area church — as a way to flirt.

“The people (in Toronto) were amazing,” Curry said. “It’s so diverse. It has good energy and, of course, amazing candy.”

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Dell Curry was 35 when he signed with the Raptors in August 1999 to help a young franchise learn how to win. To avoid pulling his kids out of school just as the academic year was beginning, Dell lived alone in Toronto for a season.

Then, midway through Stephen’s seventh-grade year, Dell and his wife, Sonya, decided the family needed to be together. The three Curry children — Stephen, Seth and Sydel — enrolled at Queensway Christian College, a K-12 school with no more than 25 kids per class.

The seventh- and eighth-grade basketball team, which didn’t hold tryouts, had long been a league-wide laughingstock — that is, until Stephen’s arrival. With a home court made of rubber flooring, Curry guided the Saints to a 16-0 record his eighth-grade season. In the league championship game against Hillcrest Jr. Public School, Curry hit three 3-pointers in the final minute, single-handedly erasing an eight-point deficit to lift his team to victory.

His father’s Raptors weren’t so fortunate. In Game 7 of the 2001 Eastern Conference semifinals against Philadelphia months earlier, Dell threw an inbounds pass to Vince Carter, who missed a potential game-winning jumper at the buzzer. When Dell retired after the following season, the Raptors began a four-year playoff drought.

The Currys moved back to Charlotte, but they maintained the friendships they’d built in Toronto. Stephen Curry keeps in contact with James Lackey, his coach at Queensway Christian College, and gets him comp tickets to Warriors-Raptors games. Dell still trades the occasional text with Kuhn, who used to attend Sunday services at Toronto’s Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church with the Currys.

Many Raptors fans are well-versed on Stephen’s ties to their city. Outside of Raptors jerseys, Curry’s No. 30 is the most popular sell in Toronto.

“Everybody knows he spent time here, and everybody knows he married a Canadian,” Kuhn said. “You won’t hear us boast about it because we’re not really that type of people, but there’s definitely an underlying pride that he spent some of those formative years in the greater Toronto area.”

When the Currys lived in Toronto, Raptors fans were ecstatic if their team escaped the first round of the playoffs. Now, after losing to LeBron James’ Cavaliers in three straight playoffs, Toronto is in the franchise’s first Finals.

When Stephen arrives at Scotiabank Arena for Game 1 on Thursday, he’ll say hello to the security guards and team staffers who remember his practice-court duels with Seth, now a backup guard for the Trail Blazers. In those days, Stephen often pretended he was in the Finals.

The only difference between those daydreams and his current reality is that, instead of a Raptors uniform, he dons a Warriors one.

“At the arena, a lot of the same people work as ushers or security there in the back, when me and my brother were running around, causing trouble,” Curry said. “It’ll be cool to take in that experience.”

Connor Letourneau is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cletourneau@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Con_Chron