On Monday, thousands of Toronto Football Club fans jammed Nathan Phillips Square to celebrate the big MLS trophy win on Saturday. The team arrived in an open-air double-decker bus that left Maple Leaf Square and crawled up Bay St. as people cheered it along. If stockbrokers still used ticker tape, and if modern skyscraper windows could open, certainly some paper would have rained down on them too. The city was happy.

As a classic bandwagon fan that arrives late to the game, distracted by other things during the regular season, I applaud the fans who are there for the long haul, cheering on our various teams during the good and bad times alike. What I do truly love to participate in, though, are the celebrations after important wins. Big sports games are euphoric civic moments, connecting people together across cultures and classes, even if just temporarily. The world seems increasingly terrible sometimes, and we need these kinds of joyful moments to keep going.

Sometimes there are riots after games like those that have occurred in Vancouver and Montreal after Stanley Cups. No smugness here, though: if the Leafs ever win, all of Toronto will surely burn to the ground, so pent up is the desire for the cup.

Toronto celebrated in the streets after the TFC win this past Saturday, but not where I expected. When the game ended, I was passing through the Eaton Centre where you would never have known Toronto had just won a major sports championship. The shoppers kept shopping and the real champion there seemed to be Canada’s tallest Christmas tree, complete with its own security guard to keep people from reaching out and touching it. It stretches 30 metres up to the Eaton Centre’s ceiling and is covered with hundreds of red lights, perhaps an unintentional nod to TFC colours.

However, outside on Yonge St., where I thought there would surely be crowds and cars honking in what’s become the usual impromptu public celebration after a sports victory, there were no TFC fans to be found: there was no instinctive gravitation to Yonge.

At one of these celebrations a few years ago, perhaps it was an Olympic hockey win — they begin to blur together when you’re on the bandwagon — the celebrating fans followed the pedestrian scramble signs and took over the intersection when the “Walk” sign was on for all crossings. They then retreated to the sidewalk when the “Don’t walk” sign came on, repeating this over and over. Such rule-following may bode well for a riot-free Leafs victory.

During the World Cup celebrations, fans often gravitate to wherever their respective populations live in one of the many ethnic enclaves around the city. A favourite story I’ve told many times occurred during the 2002 World Cup. The night South Korea made the semi-finals for the first time in their history, I was walking back to my Koreatown apartment on Clinton St. around 4 a.m.

I could hear cheering a block from Bloor St., and every bar and restaurant was packed with people watching the game as it was being played live in Gwangju, South Korea. The South Korean team won as dawn broke in Toronto, and Bloor was suddenly rushed by thousands of celebrating people. After a short time, without any leader or organization, the mass of people started walking east, surely waking people up along the way with the noise.

I marched with everyone, carried along by the energy, until we got to Yonge St., where, one by one, everyone stepped on Toronto’s main street, then marched back to Koreatown, where a gauntlet of people remained for three days, reducing Bloor to two lanes of traffic. I often retell this story because it’s one of the reasons I love this city and I was glad I was out late that night.

Somehow, instinctively, everyone that morning knew it was important to hit Yonge and represent on the street that connects everyone together, at least symbolically. When the Jays won the World Series in 1992, Yonge was jammed with people celebrating, even though it was a few kilometres from the SkyDome where 45,000 watched it on the Jumbotron. People knew the main street was the place to be.

I got the bug for big public sports celebrations that same night, but in Windsor where we watched the game on what now seem like unimaginably small televisions in a downtown basement pool hall that let high school students like us nurse 7Ups for extended periods of time. When the Jays won, we walked two blocks over to Ouellette Ave., Windsor’s main drag, where many hundreds of people had gathered, creating a smaller version of what was happening in Toronto. Friends from across Canada said similar things happened in their cities: endless high-fives and hugs with strangers and overwhelming joy.

So it was a bit of a disappointment to find Yonge bereft of TFC supporters Saturday. They certainly existed, though, but they were in the streets of Liberty Village, adjacent to BMO Field, which in the last few years has become the territory of TFC supporters. Perhaps it’s a coming of age for this sometimes-maligned neighbourhood, sneered at by condo- and millennial-haters alike.

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Certainly it has its troubles, with lack of transit and artists and other creatives who’ve long resided in live-work spaces that are being pushed out by redevelopment, but an awful lot of other people have chosen to call this place home and have created a busy neighbourhood of their own. Now they host occasional celebrations like this, with marches to the stadium before the TFC games, complete with flares and smoke canisters.

This is good for Liberty Village. But perhaps as the TFC fan base grows and more people watch in bars and in their homes in other parts of the city, some of them will gravitate to Yonge when they win again. It would be a shame not to see red represented on Toronto’s main street too.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef