When Ted Rogers, the president of Rogers Communications, and Ralph Wilson, the owner of the Buffalo Bills, announced last winter that the Bills would play eight games at the Rogers Centre over the next five years, the message seemed ominously clear: the NFL was invading. For supporters of the Canadian Football League, the news spelled the end of not only the Toronto Argonauts, but of the league as well, which couldn’t survive without a team in its largest market.

In fact, Rogers’ aide-de-camp, Paul Godfrey, had been trying to lure four-down football to Toronto for 20 years, motivated less by financial rewards than a superannuated infatuation with bringing “big-league” football to a big-league city that deserved no less. Now Rogers, along with partner Larry Tanenbaum, chairman of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, had apparently taken an irrevocable first step in either moving the financially troubled Buffalo team to Toronto, or convincing the NFL to grant a new franchise to the city by demonstrating the enormous demand for NFL football. When Argos owners David Cynamon and Howard Sokolowski jumped on board the Bills bandwagon, offering a joint ticketing venture that would give Argos season ticket holders first dibs on Bills seats in Toronto, it seemed like a desperate gamble, a tactic aimed at salvaging something from a situation careening out of control. The manoeuvre, along with a remarkable initial surge of interest from NFL fans in the city, only ramped up the mood of impending doom among CFL boosters. Newspapers sounded the alarm; a unique piece of Canadian connective tissue was in peril. Sports writer Steve Simmons wrote in the Sun, “People will pay [for Bills tickets]. The way they pay for Maple Leafs tickets. This is, after all, Toronto… Get used to it: the NFL is coming to a domed stadium near you.” In the Canadian football universe, the sky was falling.

But the truth was something else altogether. By bringing the Bills here, chances are good that Ted Rogers et al. haven’t assured an NFL franchise in Toronto, but rather have guaranteed that there won’t be one here for the foreseeable future. Their miscalculation has been innocent and baffling, in a star-struck way usually associated with your average fan, not a major mogul. That, or Ted and the boys have outsmarted themselves.

A little background: The Toronto Argonauts Football Club, founded by the Argo­naut Rowing Club in 1872, is the oldest professional sports team in North America to have the same name since its inception. The team has had a storied, checkered history, at first enjoying great success (10 Grey Cups up to 1952) and then maddening futility (no Grey Cups for the next 30 years)—a shift so extreme that the team’s signature phrase, the “Argo bounce,” went from denoting great good luck to great bad luck in what seemed like an eye blink. Toronto being Toronto, Argos fans were enamoured of the big-name American stars the team specialized in luring north, a trend that reached its peak in the ’70s with Joe Theis­mann, Terry Metcalf and Anthony Davis. Like the CFL itself, though, the Argos experienced a popularity decline as the ’90s wore on that even marquee players like Doug Flutie and a trio of Grey Cup wins couldn’t cure.