Toronto: North America's Worst Sports Town

That's according to ESPN:The Magazine.  Stephen Marche explains how painful it is to be a Toronto sports fan, especially a Leafs fan:

 The Leafs, who matter to Torontonians more than all the other teams combined, have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967, and they haven't made the playoffs in a franchise-record six seasons. The only team with a longer dry spell is the Florida Panthers. The Leafs' major source of hope seems to be Brian Burke himself, but when the major source of your dreams is a front-office guy, you are in a dark place. Cheering a GM, to me, is hitting rock bottom. And this in Canada's biggest city, where hockey matters more than baseball in Boston or basketball in Indiana or football in Texas. The only other places where sports dwell so near the most profound and abiding national questions are rugby in New Zealand, which recoups the warrior culture of the Maori, and football in Buenos Aires, where the slumdog Boca Juniors battle the uptown Millonarios in a never-ending class war. Maybe Real Madrid against Barcelona could be added to that list, but nobody else. People who were surprised that Vancouver burned after the Stanley Cup playoffs last year are unaware of the history of the sport in Canada. Of the 10 biggest riots in Canadian history, six began at hockey games.
During the 2010 Olympics, more than 80 percent of the country watched the men's hockey finals. Our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is legitimately an expert on the history of the game; the only reason he hasn't finished his book on the early days of the NHL is that he's been busy running the country. The history of the game and the history of the country are much the same thing: You can trace the rise of Quebec separatism, for example, to the Rocket Richard riots in 1955. On the other hand, hockey is the one mass-media phenomenon for which English and French Canadian have the same stars — not true of any other form of entertainment. Immigrants join hockey as fans and players as soon as they join the Canadian middle class. More than a hundred thousand people watch Hockey Night in Canada broadcast in Punjabi.

That sums up the significance of hockey in Canada.  In my one trip to Toronto, I managed to spend several hours at one local establishment, drinking my way through Canadian beers I had never seen before.  What entertained me the most, other than giving an anti-royalist a hard time about the Queen, was listening to several guys reflect on the 1992-1993 Toronto Blue Jays.  They listed nearly the entire roster, as they reminisced.  As they rattled off names, I kept thinking how I'd forgotten about all those guys.  These folks didn't.  They remembered them like yesterday, and considering how bad the Blue Jays have been since, I was impressed how they still followed the team.  I can't believe how bad the Leafs have been though.  That has to depress the hell out of the population of Ontario.