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On Monday, DeMar DeRozan did not need a pick-me-up. He recorded a career-high 42 points, and matched another best with 11 rebounds. He was the reason for the Raptors’ 99-96 win over Houston, their best victory in about six weeks, and was certainly trending toward joy, not sorrow, post-game. He got a visit from his toddler daughter, Diar.

“Say hello,” DeRozan encouraged his daughter, hoping she would introduce herself to the media contingent. She obliged.

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Channeling their avian instincts, they then began moving their arms up and down, as if they were flapping. This was nothing new.

“I looked over there one game, and I was like, ‘What the hell are they doing?’ I didn’t understand what they were doing,” DeMar DeRozan said. “Now I know.”

Explaining it, however, requires knowledge of multiple years of Raptors minutiae.

Rewind more than five years to Chris Bosh’s final season on the Raptors. (Do not feel bad if you have blocked most of that season out of your memory, save for some unintentional comedy from Hedo Turkoglu. It was a painful one.) Journeyman wing Antoine Wright played 67 games for that team, including 10 starts. An even less noteworthy footnote to Wright’s Raptors career: He became known for hollering “Get up, bird” whenever the team charter took off, willing the airplane to work as designed.

For some reason, that phrase has stuck around the Raptors all these years later, even though DeRozan and Amir Johnson are the only commonalities that link that year’s roster and this season’s team.