The crafty Magic guard-who may or may not have been picturing his six-week stint in Toronto in 2013 as he pumped in a career-playoff-high 25 points-called it “the biggest shot of career.” And if Orlando goes on to win the series, it could end up being more than that-it may be the shot that rewrites the Raptors’ history. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself in the days after watching Augustin’s 3-pointer go down. Give the denizens of Jurassic Park a cardiac MRI and you’ll get something that looks like those photos of the black hole-a galaxy-sized void where our hearts should be. Familiarity breeds contempt, or maybe just comfortable numbness. Last April, Alex Wong wrote an excellent essay for The New Yorker whose title, “ The Anxiety and Fear of the Toronto Raptors Fan,” pretty much summed up the whole deal this past January, The Ringer’s Danny Chau took a field trip to our fair city- and its peerless roti establishments-to take the temperature of a fan base that’s not only inured to losing but inured to hearing about how it’s inured to losing. Two years ago, The Ringer let me write A Brief History of the Toronto Raptors Coming Up Short, in which I speculated about whether 2018 would finally be the year that the Raptors escaped the proverbial tar pit of the franchise’s primal scene: that wayward jumper by Vince Carter in 2001 against the Philadelphia 76ers that unofficially ended the Vinsanity era with a miss and established a collective inferiority complex. It’s not just that the narrative of the Raptors’ digging themselves into a hole is familiar, it’s that the narrative-about-the-narrative is getting old. Seven Takeaways From the NBA Playoffs’ Opening-Weekend Bonanza
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