Looking back from the distance of a few years, we'll be able to pick out the date Toronto tipped forward and became a basketball-first city.

It's today. The day we started giving up on losing.

The nexus of that change will be Maple Leaf Square, rebranded for the NBA playoffs as Jurassic Park. They'll start admitting people at 9:30 in the morning. No city in the league is able to distill its pandemonium so well. Those images are a viral call to arms.

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About 12 hours later, a different mood will envelop the city. More of a smell, really. That's when the Maple Leafs will in all likelihood lose their 10-to-1 shot at landing Connor McDavid. Then the club hits rock bottom. For the next few years, the Leafs will be tunnelling.

And that's it. It's over for the foreseeable future. Hockey's out; basketball takes its place.

Toronto needs something. It's more than a confidence boost. It's an ego-reclamation project. The Raptors are finally about to give it to us.

None of the important local clubs – Blue Jays, Leafs and Raptors – has won a playoff round in the past 11 years. Cumulatively, they've only played in two.

During that same period, Boston's baseball, hockey and basketball teams have played in 45 postseason series.

We're, like, one-20th of a Boston. How bad does that make you feel? If you've spent any time in the company of Bostonians, you'll know it can't possibly be bad enough.

Eleven years is an entire sporting generation, during which we've all become inured to defeat. You think it's your fault you're always misplacing your keys? No, it's not. It's Toronto's fault. The city you live in made you a loser.

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If aliens decide to make Toronto the spot for their big Earth reveal, this local curse will cause them to crash the ship into the CN Tower and come staggering out like a bunch of green hobos.

We don't just need the Raptors to win. We need them to save us from our descent into (quite reasonable) paranoia. Everything is starting to seem like a conspiracy.

Game 1 of the best-of-seven series, against the Washington Wizards, tips off at 12:30 p.m. – which is the NBA sticking its thumb in Toronto's eye. The teams that don't matter go first.

Since the civic zeitgeist is built around the idea of thwartedness, we ought to get together and send a bouquet to NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Or maybe it's cheaper to boo him at the game. He'll be in attendance.

Silver's too new and too good to have reached the Public Enemy stage of his executive career. Everyone gets there eventually. Kicking it off here would be something special we could share together – our thing.

We hate everyone, including ourselves, so we might as well hate Adam Silver, too.

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In advance of The Anger Games, they trotted the Raptors out on Friday to say all the right things. Sadly, they refused to disappoint.

Before they came out, general manager Masai Ujiri was doing something he never does. He was standing outside the practice court at Air Canada Centre, waiting for his team's workout to end.

He didn't want to go inside and watch, and he was too scared to leave, just in case something terrible happened. On this basis alone, Ujiri has become a true Torontonian.

The team doesn't seem bothered. Last year, it was all a bit atremble before things started. There was an electric, nervous energy about the Raptors. This time, it's total cool. They seemed as though they'd prefer to do their interviews lying down.

There were no last-minute provocations following Paul Pierce's "It" manifesto. To hear them tell it, everyone on the Raptors feels a tremendous amount of "respect"" for the Wizards forward. When you put the word "respect" through the sports-to-average-citizenese translator, it comes out the other end as "hate you so much, that if I saw you walking down the street, I'd hit you with my car."

But nobody could muster any public animus. Pierce is a fading old goat and you get the strong feeling these next two weeks are the Golgotha of his career. The team's in-house firestarter, Ujiri, tried to get a rise out of him on Thursday, saying he doesn't "have enough money to respond" to Pierce's comments – a reference to the fine that will follow.

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There was an obvious riposte for Pierce – offer to peel a few off the billfold and get this thing properly started.

Instead, in a statement so furiously backpedalling he may have thrown a hip, Pierce called the Raptors "a great team."

He knew what was waiting for him at the ACC and he flinched. Still, living long enough to see Pierce become reasonable and fair-minded is a tragedy. It's like watching a shark eat a salad.

Pierce knows the Wizards are in real trouble. Their immobile, pack-the-paint defensive style is spectacularly ill-suited to take on Toronto. The Raptors can stand back and barrage them from long distance.

Also, the Wizards can afford to lose. They're probably a year away from landing free agent Kevin Durant. That's their final destination.

Toronto has to win now. It doesn't have any other choice. You always like that sort of team's chances.

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DeMar DeRozan provided the one-word pullquote. Asked if there was any way this season could be considered a success if the Raptors fail to advance out of the first round, DeRozan said, "No." Then he said it again.

That's the first time anyone's been that specific and it gives you hope.

Lou Williams can't be expected to understand our grand tradition of despair, thought last year's Game 7 defeat to the Brooklyn Nets had left the team "scarred."

This city doesn't have any room left for scars. It's just one enormous scab. Toronto's been so badly burned by its teams, we should all sleep in a hyperbaric chamber.

Someone asked coach Dwane Casey if he "fears" the Wizards.

"Fear?" Casey said, like he was hearing the word for the first time. "I've been in this too long to have fears. What I have are concerns."

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We have a few concerns, too. For instance, how do we begin to emotionally adjust if someone in Toronto is good at something? Can winning be physically uncomfortable, like growing pains? If we can't spend all our free time poor-mouthing local athletes, will we have to start saying nice things about people and actually building those damn subways? Because that's going to take some getting used to.

We've been down so long, it looks like up. We don't know any other way. It can be a sweet ache – that feeling that you're incapable of being disappointed any more.

That's what makes these next couple of weeks so risky. People are starting to believe. Even Pierce knows the tide's going out.

So, this isn't just a playoff series. It's flirting with a new way of looking at things.

This city has built a way of life around Loserdom. It makes us hard, and also hard to shake. That's the good part.

What's no fun is that there is so rarely a chance to get together and celebrate ourselves. We do it vicariously – through other teams in other places. That's why the recent world junior hockey championships were a much a greater success in Toronto than in the other host city, Montreal.

Montreal's used to winning. Toronto treats winning the way ex-cons treat sunlight – a rediscovered pleasure. We'll do anything to bask in it again.

It's still a ways off, but for the first time in forever, it's in sight again.

Basketball comes to the fore this afternoon. Hockey begins fading into nothingness by evening. And shortly thereafter, the country's biggest city begins contemplating another radical remake of the way it looks at itself.