Toronto FC make their home debut Saturday before a sold-out throng of 20,000 that will raucously welcome them into BMO Field, an absolute gem of a new, soccer-only stadium.

 It's the sort of reaction that might be understandable if this was a club that had won a championship, made a series of high-profile off-season signings or just got Jose Mourinho angry. But this is an expansion team in an early-season crisis, having lost, on the road, their first three games by a combined score of 9-0.

 The results hardly matter. Nor will the outcome of the home opener. The stadium will be filled all year and it will be a league leader for attendance and atmosphere. You see, it's not the team that matters to most fans, at least not just yet. It's the game itself. 

That's the remarkable part of these circumstances. World Cups aside, fans here have endured a steady diet of negative soccer coverage from prominent local media outlets, yet their healthy appetite for their game has not only survived, but grown.

Despite the absence of any broad-based marketing campaign, season ticket sales topped  7,000 prior to the January announcement of David Beckham's transfer to L.A. Galaxy and are now close to 14,000 in total. Single game and group ticket sales have assured that every home game will be virtually sold out. It's a remarkable re-birth for pro soccer in Canada.

The collapse of the North American Soccer League and, later, the Canadian Soccer League, forced the city's last pro team, the Blizzard, to close up shop, leaving Toronto fans without a fully-professional local team to follow for almost two decades.

Yet the game has continued to thrive locally, a growing interest visible most summer weeknights in the form of jam-packed recreational playing fields, or every four years when the streets fill with chanting, singing, flag-waving World Cup fans proclaiming support for their favorite team or homeland.

Streets shut down, traffic gets diverted, beer mugs clink, everyone smiles. Only hockey could top this reaction, and an NHL title for the Maple Leafs isn't on anyone's radar.

Perhaps the most profound evidence of soccer's development here is found in the home-grown talent who have recently moved on to enjoy outstanding professional careers.

The long list includes: Dwayne De Rosario at Houston Dynamo, Paul Stalteri at Tottenham Hotspur, Tomas Radzinski at Fulham, the De Guzman brothers, Julian at Deportivo La Coruna, Jonathan at Feyenoord. And then there's Paul Peschisolido, a charismatic striker known throughout England as the 'Super Sub', with 114 goals, and counting, since leaving the crumbling Blizzard in 1992 for Birmingham City and a handful of clubs thereafter. There are others on the way.

This was never enough to satisfy soccer's abundant media critics. Led by Canada's largest daily newspaper and the city's most influential sportstalk radio host, they lined up to slag the building of the $72 million stadium, which is truly a wonderful showcase for the game. They branded it a white elephant as they forecast that the team would flounder and quickly wither, part of the eventual and, they hoped, final demise of professional soccer in North America. 

 The instant impact of Toronto FC suggests they couldn't have been more wrong. It has also sparked an urgency among soccer fans in Vancouver and Montreal, two major markets with and established history of strongly supporting the game, to see their cities become the next targets for MLS expansion.

So why have soccer fans, before a ball was kicked in earnest, before a full team had been assembled, suddenly thronged to support Toronto FC, when media indifference suggests they should be watching something else?

The critics have always maintained that, sure, lots of kids, in ever increasing numbers, were playing soccer in past years, but that didn't have any bearing on how well a pro team would do - they've failed before, surely they'll fail again. Well, the world changes quickly and quietly these days.

Previous generations of soccer players lacked the media options to stay in touch with the game as they grew older. Today, though, their kids, this generation's young players, are able to maintain their interest in any league, watching live games on digital or satellite TV, playing video games with more detail about the sport than ever before, or simply loading their iPods with highlight clips from the internet via youtube and sharing them with schoolmates. Has anybody under the age of 18 not seen Lionel Messi's sensational goal vs.Getafe?

 The return of the pro game now gives those aspiring youngsters a chance to watch live action, share in the noisy stadium atmosphere and develop their own hometown heroes. Since mom and dad were playing the game themselves not so long ago, they 'get' soccer, so it's not hard now to get them to buy tickets.

All of this seems to have passed under the noses of the city's mainstream media, an old guard that had to be courted in past years to ensure that vital publicity and promotion endeavours reached the eyes and ears of the ticket-buying public.

Soccer in Canada, and much of America, for that matter, has arrived at what's often referred to nowadays as'the tipping point', succeeding without the approval or co-operation of the traditional media mechanisms. 

Someone should call the papers and tell them about it. But the game's doing fine without them and their opinions just don't seem to matter much any more.  Kinda like how soccer fans felt 'round here about 10 year ago.