What is this strange feeling, floating around Toronto, wiggling through bloodstreams and lighting up the brain? It’s not spring, not yet. It’s not good transit planning. Maybe someone slipped something into the drinking water. It’s strange.

This is not a hopeful sports city. Well, let’s amend that. It’s a hopeful sports city that has, for some time, gone unrewarded. In 2011 ESPN named Toronto the worst sports city in North America. In 2014 ESPN ranked the Toronto Maple Leafs dead last among 122 sports franchises when it came to on- and off-field performance, likability, and affordability. Nobody here really raised much fuss, because how could they, really? They knew better than anybody.

Well, things change. On Thursday night the Maple Leafs won their seventh game in their past nine; they are now three points clear of the Boston Bruins with a game in hand, and five points clear of the New York Islanders, who have a game in hand. With nine games left it would take a collapse to miss the playoffs; it would take a smaller collapse to avoid facing either Ottawa or Montreal in the first round.

This is where people everywhere should cackle in anticipation. Two Canadian teams meeting in the playoffs is a bonfire of barely hidden but generally acceptable hatred, a bubbling cauldron of buried resentment, and nothing generates resentment in this country like the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have been force-fed to the rest of Canada for generations, regardless of how unpleasant the experience was for everybody involved.

But these Leafs are . . . good! The Brendan Shanahan administration has put a lot of focus and attention on how this young, talented team would play in the biggest games of the season, and these Leafs have delivered. They could have blown a lead to Detroit, but didn’t. They rebounded from a spanking by the Florida Panthers to shut out Tampa Bay (despite the fishing trip scandal, which was . . . some guys went fishing? Two days before a game? Really? That was the scandal?)

They got a little lucky against Boston, dusted the top-of-the-conference Blue Jackets, and if they make some hay out of Buffalo-Florida-Nashville-Detroit-Buffalo, the Metropolitan Division gauntlet at the end won’t matter as much.

The three leading Leafs scorers are rookies with room to grow. The Leafs are a top-10 possession team when you adjust for score, per puckonnet.com. They have held more leads going into the third period than any team in the NHL — 37 times, to 36 for Washington and 35 for Pittsburgh entering Friday night. There’s something here.

So if the Leafs reach the post-season, does anybody think they couldn’t beat Ottawa, who are a below-average possession team? Who says they can’t beat Montreal, Carey Price’s re-ascension to godhood notwithstanding? (Note: The top-ranked goaltender this season at even strength is Ottawa’s Craig Anderson, with a save percentage at 93.96. Price is fourth, at 93.74 and rising. Frederik Andersen is 12th, at 92.83.)

The point is, though: It would be a delightful bonfire either way, and the Leafs are very likely to get there. And unlike the only other Leafs team to make the playoffs since the first lockout, this one is going somewhere.

And the Raptors . . . well, last season was great. The conference final, standing next to LeBron James, winning a couple games. Best season in franchise history.

But nobody thought the Raptors were going to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Raptors didn’t, and the Cavaliers didn’t, and they were both right. And this season, it felt very Toronto for Kyle Lowry to undergo wrist surgery right after the team acquired Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker at the trade deadline. Perfect.

Except . . . the Raptors might be good, too. Like, sneaky-good. Thursday night in Miami, the Heat were up 15 in the first quarter, which was notable, as, since the all-star break, the Heat had been outscoring teams by 9.7 points every 100 possessions in those 14 games, the best mark in the league. They strafed Toronto by 15 two weeks ago. They’ve been rolling for almost three months now.

And they were up 15 in the first quarter, and then Toronto killed ’em. It was Miami’s lowest-scoring game since December, and while the Raptors offence clanks when DeMar DeRozan isn’t doing his this-is-going-in-watch-this routine, they are now 10-5 without Lowry. More, in those 15 games, the Raptors had the third-best defensive rating in the league, at 101.3. Before P.J. Tucker and Serge Ibaka arrived, they were 16th, at 106.0. The Raptors front office has mused that if Lowry can come back and merely be a competent version of himself — if he can rebalance the offence — this is the second-best team in the East. Oh, and Cleveland’s defence has been a genuine mess: 22nd overall, 29th since the all-star break. Hmm.

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None of this means the Leafs will win a round, or that the Raptors will topple LeBron. The odds are still against both; both are only possible, nothing more.

But Toronto hasn’t seen both their hockey and basketball teams make the playoffs in the same year since 2002. It hadn’t seen its baseball team reach the post-season since 1993 before runs to the American League Championship Series the last two seasons and, who knows, the Jays could do it again if the pitchers stay healthy. Even TFC has escaped the wilderness. The point is this: This is Toronto, and in the year 2017, you are allowed to hope.