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Consider the following facts, presented in ascending order of quirkiness. The Wolfpack’s 2018 season began on Feb. 4; their first home game is scheduled for May 5. Due to ongoing upgrades to the turf at their home field, that game will be held in Markham, Ont. The Wolfpack don’t play inside Toronto until June 9, at which point they have eight straight home dates through to the end of July. And because of that skewed schedule and his Australian roots, their captain has yet to actually set foot in Canada.

“The closest thing to Canada I’ve done is eat maple syrup,” said McCrone, who signed with Toronto last September after spending nine seasons with teams in Australia’s National Rugby League. “I’m a little excited to get over there and have a look.”

Photo by Supplied by Toronto Wolfpack

This past off-season, the Wolfpack brought McCrone and other players with laudable track records in England and Australia to the club in hopes of finishing in the top four of the Championship, which would advance them to a playoff round where they could earn promotion to British rugby league’s top division, the Super League. It has been the franchise’s stated destination since it debuted in the third tier of the ladder, League 1, in 2017, a year in which the Wolfpack won 20 of their 22 matches, outscored their opponents by 42 points per game and regularly drew crowds of 7,000 fans to Lamport Stadium in downtown Toronto. (The British teams were lucky to exceed crowds of 1,000.)

Swelling the ranks of those supporters and spreading the word about rugby league — the 13-player-a-side variant of the more familiar rugby union — in Canada were opportunities that McCrone says were too enticing to pass up in free agency. Teammates have described the game-day atmosphere at Lamport to him in glowing terms, though he won’t get to experience it firsthand for several more weeks. Nine of the other 11 teams in the Championship operate out of northern England (one plays in London and another in Toulouse, France), so the Wolfpack have made the city of Manchester their headquarters for the road portion of their season. The players train at a local university four days a week and bus to hostile opposing stadiums every weekend.