Game and highlight reruns make being a sports fan a year-round passion | Canada Voices

In December, 2004, basketball legend Tracy McGrady scored 13 points in 35 seconds for the Houston Rockets against the San Antonio Spurs. This marked one of the most iconic performances of his career. Mitch Riesler grew up idolizing McGrady. He watched the game live 20 years ago and knew he was witnessing basketball history. “I’ll go on YouTube and watch that clip all the time,” he says.

Riesler, a lifelong Toronto sports fan, also watches historical sports moments and old games he wasn’t around for, including when Joe Carter hit a walk-off home run to win the ‘93 World Series for the Toronto Blue Jays and Mats Sundin scoring important goals for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the playoffs. “It’s not just me going to watch McGrady,” says Riesler. “I’ll go watch Kobe Bryant’s career highlights and then Doug Gilmour’s. You sit there for hours and watch these moments – that you did or didn’t experience – then share them with your buddies.” It’s an opportunity for him to relive the thrill of the moment and to reminisce about it with friends.

Social media and streaming platforms have overwhelmingly changed how Canadians enjoy classic sports moments. Fans can now dive back into iconic games on streaming packages such as MLB.TV, NHL Live and NBA League Pass and social media platforms including YouTube and TikTok where old games come alive again. Watching and sharing these moments allows fans to relive the excitement of old games any time, together. But they also expose fans to retired legends they weren’t alive to experience and connect them more deeply to the culture and history of their favourite team or sport.

History-making performances become forever fan favourites. A clip of Carter’s iconic home run has racked up 1.5 million views on YouTube; another of Kawhi Leonard’s four-bounce buzzer-beater during the Raptors’ 2019 playoff run has nearly 6 million views, and awestruck fans continue to comment five years later. (Riesler told me he sent his friends a clip of Leonard’s performance the day before our conversation.) These nostalgic experiences aren’t just about reliving the past. They also help fans build stronger bonds by celebrating legendary performances together.

Social media platforms including YouTube and TikTok are filled with moments fans like Riesler obsessively watch and share with their friends. But it’s not just user-generated content recorded and published by individuals. “Professional sports teams and leagues now leverage YouTube as aggressively as they do any other kind of distribution platform,” says Jonah Birenbaum, senior editor, multimedia at sports news site theScore. Official accounts run by the NHL, NBA and MLB post highlights from current games alongside archival footage or games to unite and engage the online fan community year-round on any screen.

These old sports clips aren’t something fans are watching on their phones during a commute. Noah Garden, Major League Baseball’s deputy commissioner, business and media, says that the majority of MLB.TV subscribers watch old games on their televisions. “Any time you’re watching on a television is most likely a shared experience,” says Garden. Reliving the moments is an excuse to gather as a community, and it’s reviving other ways of sharing a passion for sports.

Garden links the rise in younger fans’ interest in classic games to the resurgence of baseball cards, which introduces them to star players of a bygone era. “All of a sudden the kids want to know, what did Rickey Henderson do? What did Ryne Sandberg do? What did Nolan Ryan do?” he says.

Sports are about making memories. That’s why Birenbaum constantly rewatches José Bautista’s bat flip in Game 5 of the 2015 American League Division Series and Edwin Encarnacion’s walk-off homer in the 2016 wild card game. “You’re just trying to chase the high of the time you watched it for the first time in real-time,” he says. “Being able to revisit those iconic moments and unforgettable games is an essential part of being a sports fan.”