In November 1989, the Saskatchewan Roughriders met the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at the SkyDome in Toronto for the Canadian Football League’s championship game. I was 9 years old, and I had already developed a tortured relationship with the Roughriders, familiar to any of the million-odd people who live in the province where I grew up. Until that point in the club’s 79-year history, the Riders had taken home just one title; in an eight-team league, this fact seemed to defy the laws of statistics.

With the game soon to begin, we placed wagers on the outcome. I knew everyone would pick the Roughriders, out of loyalty if nothing else. Sensing opportunity, I chose the Tiger-Cats. It was a win-win, I thought: In the unlikely event of a Riders victory, I could rejoice; if they lost, I would be, by a 9-year-old’s standards, rich. I had already learned not put my faith in the team.

In a stunner, the Riders won 43-40 after a field goal with nine seconds remaining. The team soon reverted to form, and wouldn’t win another championship until 2007, when I was living and working in Beijing. I followed that game online from my desk at work, and when I saw the clock run down, the Riders still up by 4, my eyes dampened. In my life, there’s not a team in any sport in any place that means more to me than the Roughriders, an obscure, often mediocre club from a windy city, Regina, where I haven’t lived in 18 years and where I have no family left. It sometimes seems as if this football team is one of the last tethers I still have to the place that made me.

Canadian football isn’t rugby or Australian-rules football; it has much more in common with the American version of the game. But it’s like American football in the way Canada itself is like America: just similar enough to arouse what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” Canadian football is played with three downs instead of four, and with 12 men to a side instead of 11. The C.F.L. field is 110 yards long and 65 yards wide, and the end zones are 20 yards deep instead of 10. Touchdowns are 6 points, and field goals are 3, just as in the N.F.L., but there is also a single-point play with a French name (a rouge) awarded for punts that go into the end zone without being returned.