The Toronto Blue Jays didn’t win the World Series.
But for many Canadian families, they won something that lasted longer.
When the final out of Game 7 was recorded, the pain was real. Toronto had come within one win of its first championship since 1993. The dream ended. The trophy went elsewhere.
Yet in living rooms across Canada, something else had already happened.
Families had come back together.
Parents who once celebrated Joe Carter’s iconic walk-off in 1993 were now sitting beside their children — and, in many cases, their grandchildren — dressed in blue and white once again. The jerseys had changed. The players were new. But the feeling was unmistakably familiar.
For Tammy Care, 55, the Blue Jays’ return to the World Series wasn’t just baseball. It was a time machine.
Her son was born on the same day the Blue Jays lifted the Commissioner’s Trophy in 1992. That moment — the hospital staff wearing Blue Jays gear, the banners, the joy — became part of her family’s origin story.
Decades later, the team’s 2025–26 run stitched that memory back into the present.
“It’s not about wins or losses,” Care said. “It’s about community. Everybody wants them to succeed. Everybody feels it together.”
That sense of togetherness transcended geography.
When Game 7 arrived, Care FaceTimed her son — now living in British Columbia — so the entire family could watch together. Screens replaced couches, but the ritual stayed the same.
“It’s generational,” she said. “Sports just glue people together.”
For Adam Martinelli, 39, the World Series flipped the script.
As a child, he remembered watching the Blue Jays with his father and brother in the 1990s — half-formed memories, flashes of excitement, voices in the room. This time, he was the parent.
Now, his sons James and Oscar sat beside him, cheering for players like Addison Barger and George Springer. James, just four years old, watched every game. Oscar proudly wore a Blue Jays Home Run jacket for Halloween — a jacket already passed down from his older brother.
“It was different this time,” Martinelli said. “You’re not just watching. You’re passing something on.”
That passing-down — of fandom, of belonging, of shared emotion — became the defining legacy of the run.
For Ana Horemans, the Blue Jays’ impact stretched across borders.
As a teenager in Mexico, she watched the team on television and fell in love with the image of Canada she saw on the screen. Years later, she moved to the country she had first encountered through baseball.
Now living in Mississauga, she watched the World Series with her own children.
Her eight-year-old son Liam was transfixed.
“He says, ‘I’m going to be a professional baseball player,’” Horemans said. “It’s like watching the story repeat itself.”
That repetition — memory becoming inheritance — is why this World Series mattered even without a championship parade.
The Blue Jays didn’t just bring October baseball back to Toronto. They revived rituals that had gone dormant for a generation. They gave families a reason to sit together again, to talk, to remember, to dream.
In a country where baseball often fights for space behind hockey and basketball, the Blue Jays reminded Canada who they are — and who they’ve always been to each other.
The loss still hurt. Game 7 will linger.
But years from now, many of the kids who watched this run won’t remember the final score.
They’ll remember where they were sitting.
And who they were sitting next to.
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