Canada's World Cup players relishing the support of loud, proud home crowd

It was the sort of noise they will still hear when they are old men.

After Canada’s men scored six against Qatar, claiming their first World Cup win in the process, they might have expected love from the sold-out crowd at BC Place. But in one of those rare, beautiful moments when reality overwhelmed even their outsized dreams, they received more than an ordinary expression of it.

“The crowd in Vancouver, the national anthem — I got goosebumps,” Liam Millar said. “It was amazing. The energy the crowd gave, honestly, everything was amazing.”

For players and fans who have been around since this team’s relative dark ages, the scenes and soundtrack were close to surreal. It wasn’t so long ago that home games felt like away games, if they had any sense of occasion at all.

In a 2013 loss to Costa Rica at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, capacity 56,302, precisely 8,102 fans showed up. The Saskatoon Blades were drawing bigger crowds at the time. The now-mighty Voyageurs occupied one small section. They might have fit on a single bus.

Not coincidentally, Canada’s team was awful then, ranked 122nd in the world and in the middle of a 16-game winless streak that started with a humiliating 8-1 loss to Honduras. There were desperate nights in Toronto that might as well have been in Glasgow or Kingston, Jamaica, and it was deemed, probably correctly, that Edmonton’s empty stadium was better than a hostile one.

Now, in surprisingly short order, that same team has earned a far different reception. In its nervy opener against Bosnia-Herzegovina in Toronto, it played in front of a mostly favourable crowd, with a few small, vocal sections of blue. In Vancouver, the audience was nearly entirely Canadian, except for one clutch of outmatched