TORONTO – Hours earlier, the final shot of Game 5 had stayed a tenth of a second too long on the finger tips of Indiana’s Solomon Hill and now it wouldn’t be long until all hell had broken loose in the Air Canada Centre. These Toronto Raptors had sidestepped springtime catastrophe, pushed within a victory of overcoming the franchise’s 15-year first-round hurdle, and Masai Ujiri had come whizzing into work on Wednesday. Here it was, 8:30 a.m., and the Raptors’ general manager popped his head into a video coordinator’s office and asked: “Man, are you still wired too?”

Perhaps this Eastern Conference series shouldn’t be such a struggle for a No. 2 seed with 56 regular-season victories, but the truth is unmistakable: Winning a playoff series has transformed into a monstrosity for the Raptors.

Kyle Lowry, left, works against the Pacers' George Hill on Tuesday night. (Getty Images) More

“The crowd is waiting,” Ujiri told The Vertical. “The fans are waiting. The city is waiting. The whole country is waiting. We hope we can do it for everybody. And the players, I know they feel it.”

Hours earlier in the corridor of the arena late Tuesday, Ujiri had been chatting with the most famous Raptors fan of all. Drake had exhaled too, and shared a laugh with Ujiri and Raptors executive Jeff Weltman over a past postseason memory. Fifteen years of fervor since Vince Carter led the team past the New York Knicks in 2001, 15 years of regular-season futility and playoff failures linger like a fog rolling off Lake Ontario.

“It’s there,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey told The Vertical. “We can’t hide from it. … Listen, you’ve got to go through something as a program. Five years into our program [as a coaching staff], and the expectation level is through the roof.

“For our program, this next step is the hardest one to get … one of the hardest things to do in sports.”

Two years ago, the Raptors lost a Game 7 to the Brooklyn Nets here. A year ago, the Raptors were humiliated in a sweep to the Washington Wizards. This time, there are no justifications for failing to advance – perhaps only consequences. If these Raptors want to stay together for the long run, they need to beat the Pacers.

So Casey stared down a 13-point fourth quarter deficit and loaded the floor with his most unorthodox lineup of the season, betting on the ferocity of young players and his bench to bring the Raptors back – and they did. He has been performing constant maintenance on the psyches of his two All-Star players, too. When everyone else thrust bigger criticism and bigger burdens on DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, Casey’s conversations with them have been about the simplest of tasks on the floor, on the process.

“I haven’t once talked about our woes in the first round,” Casey told The Vertical. “Not once. There’s so much hoopla. There’s so much pressure.”

If DeRozan is the finest talent on these Raptors, Lowry is their most relentless spirit, their leader. He has struggled with his shot in the series, and finally in the fourth quarter of Game 5 he made a series of plays – absorbing a charge from Paul George, a tip-out rebound, passing for assists and defending – that impacted winning. When it was over, Lowry was championing DeRozan’s 34 points and declared that it was time for everyone to back off his co-star and feel free to double-down on Lowry himself.

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