For Grey Cup week, can’t we care about the Argos again?

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There were a thousand people or so people at the last Grey Cup celebration two years ago at Maple Leaf Square.

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It was loud and quaint and full of Double Blue love and loyalty and yet it seemed too small considering the accomplishment.

The Argos had won another Grey Cup — their eighth since the Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup.

The Argos have gone to the big game 10 times since 1967, the hockey year that hangs around the way 1940 once did for the New York Rangers. And this Sunday will be their 11th trip in the past 53 years to the Canada’s most-watched sporting event, their attempt for a fifth title in 20 years: Only the Edmonton Elks, who weren’t Elks back then, have won more since 1967.

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And yet, we go on with our days, we look the other way, we don’t think it’s cool to care much for the Argos or the Canadian Football League anymore.

Instead we spend our time complaining about the Leafs’ third line or the Raptors inability to stop anybody or the blatant mismanagement of the Blue Jays or the damn traffic we can’t seem to do anything about.

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It is what it has become.

But sometimes I wish, in a week like one, we just could suspend our built-in biases, push them aside, and celebrate the Argos for who they are and what they are and all they have managed year after year.

Sometimes I wish, in a week like this one, we could push our pre-conceived notions aside and engage in this unlikely Argos push for another ring.

What do we ask for from professional sports? We ask to be entertained. We ask for prices to be reasonable to attend. We ask for our teams to compete and contend. We ask for terrific athletes.

And dollar for dollar, game after game, the CFL has almost no equivalent for affordable sporting entertainment.

But yet that doesn’t matter. We complain about Leafs and Raptors prices. We complain that it’s a mortgage payment to take your kids to a game and buy them something to eat. We have an answer: We just don’t happen to like the answer.

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I grew up in Toronto when only two professional sporting teams mattered. There was the Argos in the summer and fall and the Leafs in the winter and spring. As a sports-crazed kid, I cared as passionately about Mel Profit and Leon McQuay as I did about Dave Keon and Johnny Bower.

There was no major league baseball in Toronto. There was no NBA basketball. There was only Leafs and Argos, and I remember being in high school and going to Argos games with my dad — that’s what we did — and at halftime it meant you went down to the corridor to buy one of those tubular plastic bottles of coke with the dixie cups and you went searching to see which of your friends were as fortunate to be there as you were.

It’s a time I wouldn’t trade for anything. The attachment and the passion for your teams. The father and son time together.

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The city and the country has grown and changed exponentially — Toronto is now a city of at least six professionals teams of significance — and the Argos have shrunk in the bigger picture. This is nothing new, really. It’s a question as old as sporting time in this city.

How did something so popular and so much a part of our sporting DNA become an afterthought of sorts?

I believe the struggles for the Argos began in 1983. The Boatmen were perennial contenders without championships. The great ‘Arrgghos’ cheer in those days was more derogatory than what it has morphed into.

The Argos finally won a Grey Cup in ’83, ending a 31-year-drought. That summer, the still-young Blue Jays, in their seventh season, won 89 games. It was almost like two sporting teams passing in the night.

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The celebration for the Argos championship was intense in ’83 — as it deserved to be. But at the same time, the city was changing. Baseball began pushing football to the side.

When you had a chance to see the Red Sox or the Yankees, you would take that over the opportunity to see the Roughriders or, in those days, the Rough Riders.

The CFL was blacking out games on television in Ontario. Terrible decisions like that became irreparable over time.

In 1976, the Argos drew 47,356 fans per game, their highest attendance in history. For almost a 10-year period, the Argos led the CFL in attendance.

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For more than the past decade now, they’ve been last in attendance in the league — the biggest CFL city with the smallest crowds, playing in the terrific facility that is BMO Field.

This city now is consumed by the Maple Leafs — every move, every day, all year long. When the Leafs won Stanley Cups, the NHL was a six-team league. It was harder to win a Grey Cup in a nine-team league than it was a Stanley Cup.

The Argos have won the past eight Grey Cups they’ve played in. They may not win on Sunday, playing without injured quarterback Chad Kelly. But this season, with all the trouble, they have again given us more than their money’s worth.

For one day, for one week really, can’t we pay them back? Can’t we just enjoy the party and the game? Can’t we just pretend to care?

ssimmons@postmedia.com

twitter.com/simmonssteve

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