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But it was not to be. The team left at the end of the next season, to more emotional scenes.

On the surface this was odd. Leaving is what Winnipeggers do. Some, like my brother and my dad, return, but for the rest the city’s response is generally more shrug than weep, born of its trademark mix of self-deprecation and hardy self-confidence. “Hey, congrats. Not to worry. There’ll be another along to take your place.” As indeed there always is.

So, surely, the same should have applied to the Jets. We were a city for a hundred years, some said, before we ever had a professional hockey team. We’ll be a city again when they’re gone.

But this missed the point. It’s one thing never to have had something you love. It’s quite another to have it, and then have it taken away.

And it’s another thing again to get it back. If you want to know why Winnipeg fans so cherish this team — why this already magical playoff run has the whole city walking about in a happy daze — consider the emotions you would feel seeing a loved one come back from the dead.

Only it wasn’t the Jets. Not really. The team that left in 1996 went to Phoenix, to become the Phoenix (now Arizona) Coyotes. The team that came to Winnipeg, in 2011, was not the Coyotes but the Atlanta Thrashers. So, quite logically, the team’s new owners, the buttoned-down True North Sports and Entertainment group, thought to call it something else: the Falcons, maybe, or the Warriors, or even the Manitoba Moose, like the city’s American Hockey League franchise.