Argonauts

The Grey Cup has come back to Toronto eighteen times, and the run tells its own story in two halves. Thirteen of those titles landed between 1914 and 1950 — a club that spent the first half of the twentieth century rarely out of the final. Then the trophy stopped coming. Thirty-three years passed before it returned in 1983, and the next stretch arrived in fits: 1991, then back-to-back wins in 1996 and 1997, then a long wait again until 2012, the most recent of the eighteen.

By the time that first Grey Cup was won in 1914, the club had already existed for four decades — it was founded in 1873, long before the Canadian Football League took the shape it has now. Few teams in the sport carry that much back-story into a single trophy case.

Toronto knows the team as the Argos, a name shorter and older-sounding than the club's formal one, and it has stuck through every relocation of home ground. BMO Field, holding 25,000 for football, is where that name gets sung now. The colours have stayed blue and white throughout, the one constant running under the thirteen-thirty-three-year gap and everything since.