Hours after Raptors forward Patrick Patterson published his ode to ‘The North’ in The Players’ Tribune, the city he celebrated rallied around his promise to “show the world Toronto isn’t just a great basketball city — it’s the best basketball city.”

Ahead of the Raptors’ first game against the Indiana Pacers, hundreds of fans gathered and waited outside the Air Canada Centre to get into the Ford Fan Zone (Jurassic Park) to stand and watch the game on Maple Leaf Square’s big screen.

Inside the arena, fans rushed to put on the red, grey, black or white T-shirts that hung over the back of their seats in a camouflage pattern. Raptors game day and arena staff wore shirts crested with “REP HARD.”

Early and often, the crowd tried to show Pacers all-star Paul George he wasn’t welcome in their city, booing as he missed several half-court shots in warm-ups before making one and flexing as he ran to the locker room.

“Let’s go Raptors!” chants started immediately following the fans’ rendition of O Canada.

“They were rocking at the beginning of the game,” Raptors head coach Dwane Casey said. “The fans were great as usual.”

“Yo, you don’t want to get a Canadian hyped,” Patterson wrote in his piece. “They reach a volume level that I think might be illegal in the States. It’s unreal.”

And as the lights went black and the Raptors were introduced to the crowd, that much was clear. The tone was set with deafening noise.

At one point in the game, Raptors guard Cory Joseph said he couldn’t hear a call.

“That’s how loud the crowd was,” he said. “They do a great job and we’re going to continue to need that.”

With Drake sitting courtside, in a camouflage of his own, the building was Toronto’s.

But the Raptors didn’t respond and the team that has never won a seven-game series dropped their playoff opener on home court for the third straight year.

And Joseph knows the Raptors need to do a better job in front of their crowd.

“The crowd’s great, the crowd’s always great,” Joseph said. “They help us a lot, they give us energy.”

The boost the fans provide and the passion they bring can’t be questioned, according to Casey.

“The fans were great as usual,” the Raptors coach, who has suffered the last two first-round exits firsthand, said. “[The crowd] made guys feel the excitement but we have to play through that.”

For an Indiana team that has battled adversity all year, playing on the road feels comfortable.

“Our team, we have the mindset that we don’t have a home-court-advantage-type-of record because we had a lot of change this year,” said Pacers head coach Frank Vogel after Indiana’s first win at the Air Canada Centre in its last six games.

Despite the fans’ enthusiasm, Casey thinks they’ll be tested by the loss.

“We’ll find out the true fans and who’s on your side and not because it’s a long series and once we play to our identity I think we’ll be OK,” he said.

And while all-stars Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan were confident the team is fine and urged that “it’s not last year” in their post-game remarks, Raptors fans will be counting on them to show it in Game 2 on Monday.