If we want to be understanding about it, the act of booing your own team comes from a frustrated place of encouragement.

“I expected you to be good, and you’re not. Be better. Or else.”

On this basis, there is no more angrily encouraging city in North America than the one we live in.

We’re more reactionary than Boston. More knee-jerk than New York. We throw jeering shade on Philadelphia, and if you’ve ever been there, that city has a real reason to be angry.

If you play professional sports here, Toronto wants you to know where you stand. Based on recent events, most of you should stand facing the corner.

Over the last year, we’ve given it to all four pro teams in town. Over and over again. At the slightest provocation. The slightest provocation being “losing” — statistically speaking, that’s fairly unavoidable in pro sports.

We booed Andrea Bargnani for the sin of coming back from injury. This was both sad and pointless. Can’t people see that he doesn’t want to work? They make him. Night after pointless night, he’s trying his best to agree with you.

The imperturbable Italian aside, this sort of input is rarely accepted in the giving spirit in which it was intended.

R.A. Dickey arrived here so feted he ought to have been wearing garlands. Two starts and 10 earned runs in, he left the field Sunday to an aural accompaniment best suited to a walk to the gallows.

“I think the real fans understand that it is indeed a marathon,” Dickey slyly said afterward of the jeers.

This is the crucial distinction dividing the pro- and anti-booing factions — each sees the other as either dupes or dilettantes. There can only be one group of “real” fans. Authenticity — that’s the diesel that feeds this fire.

As far as we know, booing (the idea rather than the sound) started in ancient Greece. Those people took culture seriously. They also punished “idleness” with the death penalty.

At an annual 6th century B.C. theatre festival, audiences were expected to vocally approve or disapprove of everything they saw. This behaviour wasn’t just encouraged. It was seen as a civic duty. The change was part and parcel of one of the first great democratizing movements in the western world.

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Sports is an extension of theatre (remembering that in the ancient world, plays were produced at such a prodigious rate, each one arrived as something new and electrifying — in other words, something capable of driving you mad with disappointment and outrage).

We go hoping to be amused. That expectation is heightened by the prospect of $10 beers. If you’re going to sell me beer for 10 bucks, you’re agreeing to entertain me as well. I could sit home being bored, drinking $2 beers.

You pay the money, you get to say what you want. That’s the calculus of the pro-booing set. That’s fair, as far as it goes. I wish I could boo on the streetcar. Streetcars in this city are a scandal and the people in charge need to know how badly they’re screwing things up. The only reason people don’t boo on the streetcar is that that would logically lead to violence.

There is no question about the right to boo. You have it. Now clutch the Charter and shed a tear for all those things the ancient Greeks gave us when they weren’t stoning the slothful.

The real question is, what are you booing for?

Are you booing because you’re upset at what you’ve seen? And is what you’ve seen the missed location on a pitch, or a mind-cramp in the field, or a mistimed swing at strike three?

Then that booing is pointless. It neither encourages the player (the ostensible point) nor cows the opposition. As the audience, that’s your role in all this — to make the opponents feel small and threatened. When you boo your own guys for trying and failing, you’re emboldening the enemy.

Whatever Dickey says, all Toronto fans understand that. That’s not why they’re booing.

They’re booing because they’re angry. They’re angry that the teams have been so bad for so long, and that they never seem to get any better. Even when they try their best to improve — as the Jays have done — it still goes sideways.

Essentially, Toronto fans are angry at themselves for caring. This is the same function that causes grown men to sit alone in front of the TV, screaming. We could have spent three hours learning how to play the piano or building a pillow fort. Instead, we wasted that time. On you. And you lost.

What’s important is that the players grasp this painful civic history and consider it when judging us. We don’t hate you. We hate ourselves for loving you. Until you win.

When that begins happening, we’ll slowly learn how to be nice again.

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