At any given moment, there are ten miniature Kawhi Leonards shooting hoops at the basketball courts in my east end Toronto park — aka kids wearing Toronto Raptors jerseys or T-shirts affixed with the name and number of their hero.

And at any given moment, they will rejoice or perhaps more likely, they will despair.

Because at any given moment they’ll find out if Kawhi Leonard — the mysterious guy behind the legendary buzzer beater and our city’s first NBA championship — will stay or if he’ll go.

This isn’t your average free agency waiting game that interests the sports obsessed and no one else. Kawhi’s fate seems to interest everyone — even my wife, who prior to this year’s historic playoff run thought a basketball game consisted of four periods. Thanks to Kawhi, she now knows they are called quarters. She also knows we are nearing the end of the fourth quarter of Canada’s waiting game.

But whatever the outcome of that game, I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to acknowledge and review how much Kawhi has changed our city, and to a certain extent our country. His presence on the Raptors hasn’t, as many before me have pointed out, merely raised Toronto’s profile, nor transformed T.O. from a hockey town into a basketball town. For further proof of this new reality one need only look at the ball hockey nets adjacent to the packed basketball courts at my local park; nets that are consistently unused.

Read more:

Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard pitch is on deck

Doug Smith: Kawhi-apalooza: We knew it was going to be a wild time

Opinion | Toronto needs to channel its inner Kawhi, be cool, and leave the poor man alone: Arthur

His presence on the Raptors has turned us into a paparazzi town. Drake isn’t the only person trying desperately to make the Klaw stay in Canada, according to New York Times sports reporter Marc Stein, who wrote on Twitter, “Drake is said to be mounting his own recruiting campaign on top of whatever the freshly minted champions are doing to convince him to stay.”

We, the people, have been trying to get him to stay since the moment he arrived. And in recent weeks our attempts to retain our star player have become compulsive. The actress Kate Winslet once described Canadians as “nice, kind, generous, people.” Kawhi Leonard could very well describe us as nice, kind, creepy people, because that’s apparently what we do when we’re around the basketball champion. We creep. We take photos of him eating at restaurants with his family, taking in a national landmark, shopping at Home Depot.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Kawhi may be headed for L.A. but we’ve created a Hollywood celebrity stalking culture built around the guy right here in T.O. On Wednesday, Toronto media broadcast aerial shots of what is believed to be Leonard exiting the MLSE airplane and O.J. Simpson style footage of the vehicle driving him into the city. It’s hard to imagine that an intensely private person like Leonard enjoys this.

If you had to choose between two cities with strong paparazzi cultures wouldn’t you choose the one that’s not freezing cold? The one where you grew up?

Kawhi’s brilliance on the court turned Toronto into a paparazzi town and who knows, that may factor into his decision if he decides to leave. This is strange because Toronto has always been viewed among celebrities as a place of respite from the prying eyes of the tabloid press — a place where average people are less likely to snap photos of them eating out with their friends, or approach them and ask for an autograph. Not anymore.

Kawhi made us bold. Hopefully our boldness hasn’t driven him away.