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Ujiri, talking in Toronto recently at a basketball forum where speaker after international speaker expressed wonder at the growing phenomenon of Canadian basketball, said he remembers arriving here in his first stint with the Raptors in 2007. The seeds of a basketball boom had been planted, but nothing had yet bloomed.

“You felt,” Ujiri says, “like there was something waiting to happen.”

It is happening now. But will it last?

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Rowan Barrett, the assistant general manager at Canada Basketball, remembers when he was finishing a standout career at Toronto’s West Hill Collegiate in the early ‘90s. The odd scout from Michigan or New York might drop by, but Canada was generally not on their radar. His coach, Richard Dean, made videotapes of Barrett highlights and mailed them to prospective universities.

“We sent them all over the place,” Barrett said in an interview. He had scholarship offers from Florida and California, and ultimately decided to take one from St. John’s, in New York. He was, he says, one of a handful of Canadians playing at U.S. colleges. There are more than 100 of them in American university ranks today.

“Nowadays, with YouTube and the Internet, they know who you are coming out of eighth grade,” Barrett says.

Canadians routinely finish their high school careers at U.S. prep schools, having already been deeply scouted, and have their pick of scholarship offers to big-name schools — the route followed by Tristan Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, Nik Stauskas and others.