TORONTO — On Thursday night, when the Toronto Raptors won the N.B.A. championship in Oakland, Calif., the streets of Canada erupted in a patriotic euphoria that I’d never seen before. It was the first time that a Canadian team had made it to the N.B.A. finals, and Yonge Street, in the heart of Toronto, was a multiracial mosh pit. Thousands of people were hugging and chanting, “We the North.”

There were turbans and hijabs and the echoes of diverse accents. Everyone was represented, and everyone was representing.

I stopped among the rush of bodies, and took it all in. At a time when the news is filled with racism and nationalism, here we were, with all our differences, celebrating like family. Never had I felt more connected to our flag, to this country. It was as though with this victory, a city — and a country — had found its identity.

For weeks now, Canadians have been on the edge of their seats watching the Raptors make their improbable run to the finals. In a very Canadian sort of way, we doubted whether it was even real. Could we actually win? There is an insecurity to Canadians that came from always being America’s runner-up. “Why is a brother up north better than Jordan / That ain’t get that break,” Jadakiss once rapped — a line that could be applied to all the imprisoned ambitions in Canada.

This game was about so much more than sports. America was watching us, and saw both our best and our worst.

There was one unfortunate moment when some Raptors fans at Scotiabank Arena cheered when Kevin Durant got injured, but the crowd soon gave him a standing ovation. You saw our turbaned superfan, Nav Bhatia, and you saw the immigrant in all of us. You saw the quiet confidence of Kawhi Leonard and the long-shot struggle of Fred VanVleet and you saw our most cherished qualities. You saw the genius of our team’s president, Masai Ujiri, one of the few black heads of a sports team. You saw the black and brown and white and Asian kids cheering outside the arena and you saw the future of this land.

One day, you might see the child of one of the 60,000 Syrian refugees brought here, see her in a basketball uniform, and you will know that she belonged here the minute she was born. You saw the night when “We the North” became more than just a slogan.

Toronto Raptors players and coaches celebrating their victory on Thursday. The Raptors are the first Canadian team to play in the N.B.A. finals.Credit...Tony Avelar/Associated Press

Sports is about national identity, and who counts. Canada long marketed itself as a tundra of hockey players. It was a white Anglo-French duopoly where the words “indigenous” and “immigrant” were excised from the national narrative. But lately hockey has become too expensive to play, and the children of immigrants have turned to basketball.

Shooting hoops in the rugged Toronto suburbs of my youth, my friends and I often felt as if there was little to strive for beyond that court. We played basketball because there was no room for us in the other institutions of Canadian society. Many of us did not quite know what our country stood for, or where we fit inside it. We didn’t know our own story. That’s why people were so polite here; we were unsure of who we were.

The story of Toronto is the story of the underdog. The British writer V.S. Naipaul once scoffed that Toronto was a “city of lower-class immigrants.” He was perhaps projecting his own insecurities as a child of Trinidad, for there are over 500,000 Caribbean and West Indian immigrants in Canada.

The Afro-Indian heritage of Toronto is inextricably linked to the history of slavery, indentured servitude and empire that gave the world Naipaul himself. The black Canadian population is connected to the Underground Railroad and the destruction of slavery in the United States. The South Asian population is tied to the imperial bloodshed and partition that convulsed India.

So many of us here carry the burdens of migration and know what it means to be strangers in our own skins. This quilted heritage of cultures and histories gives Toronto its unique immigrant ethos, along with the street vernacular of West Indian patois and African-American English. It does not matter where I am standing, when I hear someone say, “Wa’gwan, bruh,” or “What’s good,” I know immediately that we share a private language. We know that we were once displaced, but only recently have we discovered, in all our formless anxiety, that the story of our immigrant lives is now the story of our country.

When we chanted, “We the North,” we meant that for the first time, this city, this country, this team, belonged to us all. We had shaken off our colonial hangover, and finally embraced the swagger that came from being the outsider, the interloper.

Minorities are now a majority in Toronto. In a few decades, the country itself will be majority brown. And on the streets Thursday night we saw the future of the West. No matter what the populists say, the multicultural mixing of peoples will continue, as will the art and beauty and basketball championships that come from this diversity. Beyond the trophy, that’s the greatest victory of all.