So, before we get to the riot in Richmond Hill, a little background…

By the fall of 1992, Roberto Alomar was a sports hero the likes of which Toronto had not seen before.

Of course, the city had hosted more than its share of iconic athletes through the decades — Maple Leafs and Argonauts, and Blue Jays pretty much from the day the club arrived in 1977. There was always someone who was the biggest star in town.

But in the early ’90s, celebrity was taking on a different hue. Professional athletes, at least the most popular of them, were beginning to shed any qualifying adjectives. More like movie stars or musicians, they had started to inhabit a plane above and beyond the games they played.