Exploring TO - Sports: Toronto Argonauts

I went to my first CFL game on Friday night, and it was a fun Canadian experience!  The Toronto Argonauts were playing the Montreal Alouettes.  Do you know what an Argonaut is?  Check out Wikipedia's definition.  How about an alouette (skylark) for that matter  - I'm sure you learned the song growing up?  The Argos play at the Rogers Centre, and we went dressed for the roof to be open in the middle of a cold snap.  But, luckily the roof was closed - which would have been nice to know ahead of time!  The arena is also the baseball stadium so the set-up of the field works, but they get a bit creative. We had good seats, on the 30 yard line, and they only cost about $55 compared to the arm and leg you'll pay to go to an NFL game.


The stadium was busy, but definitely not full (explains the ticket price).  The crowd was basically big enough to fill the lower deck of a standard football field on three sides.  Though the crowd wasn't huge, they had a good energy, which was fun to be a part of.  Jason the Argonaut, the mascot, (I know, who names a mascot Jason, and look at his eyes and smile - a bit freaky!), and the cheerleaders were all wearing a bit of costume in honor of Halloween, which added to the fun atmosphere. 

The game is pretty exciting to watch because it moves so fast - they only have 3 downs to move the ball 10 yards (yes they still use yards remember the metric system is relatively new in Canada).  As I mentioned in my previous post, the CFL has a host of different rules than the NFL, and the game came to an exciting end with Montreal winning on some CFL technicality.  (Montreal missed a game winning field goal so we thought it was going to overtime, but somehow Montreal got a touchdown?!)  It was a bit of a let down since no one could follow what happened, which I still don't quite get but this link will give all the details: http://www.argonauts.ca/article/argos-30-vs-als-37.  In any case, it is worth checking out a CFL game when you move to Toronto - a truly Canadian experience. 

There is a rumor that the Buffalo Bills would move to Toronto in the future since something like half of the season ticket holders are from Toronto, and the Bills already play a few games per year in Toronto.  In the meantime - Go Argos!