My big brother Sam and I would spend our Saturday mornings obsessing over the weekly highlights and commentary on NBA Inside Stuff or shooting around in our backyard, which my parents paved over to make our very own mini basketball court to practice for our Very Important school team games. (We never took for granted how freaking cool this was, how privileged we were to have it, and how much of a SAINT my mother was for putting up with our incessant dribbling.) The Toronto Raptors joined the NBA in 1995, and since the early days of Damon Stoudamire and Doug Christie, we were hooked. We bled purple. Some of my favourite childhood memories are going to the SkyDome (RIP) with my brother, my mom, and my dad and cheering for our Raptors — a basketball team full of Black men with a Toronto logo on their chests. We knew they weren’t Canadians, but it felt like they represented us. We were basketball kids in a hockey country, Black kids in a white neighbourhood, hip-hop heads in the home of Celine and the Barenaked Ladies. The Raptors made us feel seen.