Toronto, nice to see you. You look beautiful, as always. You do still have a bit of a dishevelled hungover-but-still-drunk vibe going, but that’s to be expected, I suppose. A championship! What a feeling, right? Watching Marc Gasol guzzle an entire bottle of wine atop a double-decker bus and then sit next to the Prime Minister and mumble, “I’m drunk, man,” was the rare and treasured Canadian-Spanish Heritage Moment.

But Toronto, it’s time for a talk. First, put the phone away. I know, big ask. But put it down, because otherwise you might use it to take a picture of Kawhi Leonard. And — not to put too fine a point on this — we need to leave Kawhi the hell alone.

Seriously. I know Toronto just won its first major-league title since 1993 — all due respect to the CFL and MLS and the National Lacrosse League — and it was euphoric. The playoff run was incredible for the city, for basketball in Canada, for basketball writers who wanted to compare happy hours in Orlando, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and San Francisco. (Milwaukee, land of cheap beer, wins.)

But it’s frankly becoming creepy and invasive, and I say that as someone with regular access to and understanding of the internet. Kawhi went to Niagara Falls! Kawhi ate at a mediocre chain restaurant! Kawhi went to a home improvement store and bought what appeared to be … moving boxes!

Look, if you were renting a house and you didn’t know where you were going to live next year, and you had already bought a $14-million (U.S.) palace outside San Diego, you might need moving boxes, too. Bless Kawhi Leonard, one of the best basketball players on the planet and a two-time NBA champion, for going to the Home Depot and buying the damn boxes himself. To borrow a phrase, the cardboard man gets paid.

But that is not the point, and we are getting sidetracked! With Kawhi, it is easy and even understandable that we get sidetracked, because he carried the Raptors to the NBA title and he is a free agent and he is from Los Angeles. And while the Lakers traded for Anthony Davis without understanding the salary cap, the Los Angeles Clippers have basically waited outside his house holding a boom box over their heads all season.

And now ESPN’s Brian Windhorst says the Clippers are “hyperventilating” over what Kawhi will decide, and the Raptors are also keen to know, and amid all the rumours and the smoke flying around all you can say is that at least it seems like it’s a real decision. Kawhi is the literal difference between the Raptors getting a second chance to do a parade correctly, or not. Kawhi changes everything. Toronto knows, now. And it loves him.

But this city needs to calm the hell down. Kawhi is not a public guy. He didn’t go out a lot in his year as a Raptor, as far as anybody can tell. At one point midway through the season someone asked him where in town he lived, and Kawhi said, “I don’t know,” because he had a driver. He keeps to himself, most of the time. He went to the Jays game Thursday night, which just shows he enjoys solitude. Fun guy, family guy.

And this city is responding to Kawhi doing literally anything by taking his picture, and tweeting it. It’s like a collective ex-boyfriend stalking program. GUYS.

Look, yes, smartphones have become appendages so essential that young people are growing hornlike bones in the back of their skulls from looking down at their phones so much. Yes, Instagram and Twitter have warped our brains in ways high school could only dream. Yes, when the Raptors were introduced at the end of the parade Monday, every single person in the crowd held up their phones. And yes, the internet may have been a mistake.

But Christ on a bicycle, Toronto. It’s hard to say act like you’ve been there before to a city that has never been there before, and harder still to say it to a city that has been arguing over Vince Carter leaving for 15 endless years. But do you know how they treat celebrities in Los Angeles, by and large? They accept them. They absorb them. Celebrities are so ubiquitous there that they can just walk around in L.A. like people, enjoying the sunshine and finding good tacos and watching for the lurking silent electric cars that could kill them at any moment.

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Any basketball player not named Kobe or Magic or LeBron can stroll around L.A. without a care in the world, other than the terror of wildfires or earthquakes, the worrisome future of climate change, and traffic. And nobody cares about the Clippers there anyway. Kawhi could visit tourist attractions and eat at mediocre chain restaurants and buy moving boxes, and nobody would freak out.

Well, it feels like we are freaking out. Do you want him to stay? Do you want the Raptors to have a chance at a dynasty? Or do you want to smother him, love him to death, and drive him for good into the waiting arms of his hometown?

Be calm, Toronto. Let him be. We’re supposed to be a big city here, a world-class city. The Raptors fought their way to a title by staying level-headed, by never panicking, by following Kawhi and his equilibrious example. So if you see Kawhi, be like Kawhi; cool, chill, easygoing as a breeze. Be like Kawhi, Toronto. Unless he leaves.

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