If your first sporting thought of 2025 doesn’t go to the Toronto Blue Jays almost winning the World Series, that first thought is not the right one. The Jays’ playoff run went from improbable to incredible to perhaps an infamous conclusion, leaving Canadians heartbroken but galvanized – something that’s become increasingly rare in our often divided world. That’s something that should be appreciated.
The Blue Jays’ grip on our collective sports conscience is impressive when you consider how many significant sports moments happened around that fall run. From the patriotic drama of the 4 Nations Face-Off to the emergence or dominance of Canadian talent on the hardcourt and the hardwood, to Maple Leafs tumult, the passing of sports legends, a picturesque Canadian soccer match and the international dominance of the world’s best soccer team, 2025 touched almost all of the bases – even if you’re left haunted by a baseball wedged into the outfield wall and what would have been.
Here are The Globe and Mail’s sports department’s moments of the year.
Kyle Terada-Imagn Images via Reuters
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander quietly takes over the NBA
There’s something very Canadian in the way that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander dominated the NBA this year. His impeccable fashion sense and creative expressions on Instagram aside, the Hamilton native does things very low key, especially by the NBA’s chest-beating, let-me-tell-you-about-myself standard. The reigning MVP, NBA champion, Finals MVP and leading scorer oozes a quiet confidence.
He isn’t a high flier like Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards and he doesn’t put on the shifty, limitless range three-point shooting show that Stephen Curry gives fans. Gilgeous-Alexander is methodical, picking teams apart with a Jordan-like midrange game (and an ability to get to the line that has its detractors), bucking the three-point happy style that just about everyone else is playing.
This year was Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s sixth anniversary with the Oklahoma City Thunder.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The NBA has always been about big personalities, big markets and now more than ever, big money. In a year where the Celtics sold for over $US6-billion and the Lakers sold for $US10-billion, watching Gilgeous-Alexander lead small market Oklahoma City to the championship felt refreshing. Just 27 and surrounded by young, talented players (not to mention the army of draft picks GM Sam Presti has acquired), Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder are in position to be at or near the top of the league for years to come.
– Chris O’Leary
Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
It’s not you, it’s us, Marner tells the Leafs
We’ve all had bad breakups. Not many as predictable, protracted or public as Mitch Marner’s with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
With his contract soon to expire, the sixth-leading scorer in franchise history refused to negotiate during the 2024-25 season and later blocked a potential trade to the Carolina Hurricanes that would have yielded Mikko Rantanen. The nine-year relationship was finally severed on July 1, just hours before Marner would have become a free agent.
As part of the deal, he signed an eight-year, US$96-million contract with Toronto, which then sent him to the Vegas Golden Knights.
Mitch Marner, playing for the Las Vegas Golden Knights in a recent game against Philadelphia, parted ways with the Toronto Maple Leafs this year.Derik Hamilton/The Associated Press
A slick right wing, Marner had a career-best 102 points in his final year with the Maple Leafs. He was always a high performer but was at least partially a victim of the team’s high expectations and flops in the postseason. In his nine seasons, Toronto only advanced past the first round twice. There is the rub: He had 221 goals and 520 points in 657 games during the regular season for the Maple Leafs but, while still producing at nearly a point-per-game clip, had only 13 goals in 70 playoff contests.
Toronto selected Marner fourth in the 2015 draft after Connor McDavid, Jack Eichel and Dylan Strome. He is from Ontario and was destined for stardom from an early age. He was moody and became a polarizing figure with fans. In his final home game at Scotiabank Arena he was booed. He later said that he hired security to protect him and his family after threats were issued following the club’s loss in seven games in the second round to the Florida Panthers.
After the breakup, Marner posted a message on social media. “Leaving isn’t easy,” he wrote. “All I wanted was to help to bring a Stanley Cup to Toronto. That was always the goal, and I came up short. I gave everything I had, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. That’s hard to admit, because I wanted it so badly, for all of us.”
– Marty Klinkenberg
FRANCK FIFE / AFP via Getty Images
Paris Saint-Germain wins playing for the front of their jersey
Given the silverware, financial reward and legacy-defining opportunities on offer, championship finals rarely provide the kind of style points that live long in the memory. That pressure is often magnified in a low-scoring game such as soccer, where a solitary goal – or even, dare we say it, a penalty shootout – can be all that separates the two teams.
Happily, for both purists and casuals, the 2025 Champions League final last May was anything but.
It was essentially over as a contest just past the hour mark when man-of-the-match Désiré Doué scored his second of the game, but Paris Saint-Germain kept its foot on the gas and ran the score up to 5-0 over Inter Milan for the largest margin of victory in the history of the competition.
Désiré Doué, right, gets the ball past Inter Milan’s Federico Dimarco, left, to score for Paris St. Germain at May’s Champions League final in Munich.Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
While the win gave the Qatar-owned French club – long maligned as a state-sponsored instrument of geopolitical power – the trophy that its sportswashing campaign desperately craved, it was also a victory for true teamwork over a star-laden sports project.
In recent seasons, PSG had employed a front three of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, but achieved little of the success in the tournament it craved above all others. But when Mbappé, the last of those superstars, forced his way to Real Madrid the previous summer, it allowed coach Luis Enrique to get his team playing for the crest on the front of the jersey rather than the names on the back, setting the stage for a treble trophy haul of Ligue 1, Coupe de France, and Champions League.
– Paul Attfield
Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Victoria Mboko runs away with the NBO in Montreal
I covered a spectrum of emotions in 2025: Brooke Henderson’s Canadian Open victory, Félix Auger-Aliassime’s hard-fought U.S Open semi-final loss; wins for Team Homan and Team Jacobs at the tear-filled Canadian Olympic Curling Trials and a gut-punch for the Blue Jays in the World Series. I ran out of words to describe joy and heartache.
But none of those were as delightfully unexpected as 18-year-old Victoria Mboko’s fairytale run to the National Bank Open title. With seven wins over 12 August days in Montreal, the young tennis player became a household name in Canada.
Victoria Mboko kisses the National Bank Open trophy after her Aug. 7 win over Naomi Osaka.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
After the Canadian wildcard upset the top-seeded superstar Coco Gauff in a 62-minute straight-sets Round of 16 match, I left the ATP’s National Bank Open in Toronto and headed for the WTA’s in Montreal, planning to report from there as long as Mboko was still playing. I arrived to see her bulldoze Jessica Bouzas Maneiro in the quarters. Then she gutted out a come-from-behind semi-final win over Elena Rybakina, despite falling hard on her wrist during the match. In each post-match press conference with Mboko I had the same thoughts: she’s humble, even keeled, and unbelievably mature for a teenager.
I kept returning to the front desk at my Montreal hotel each night to extend my stay. Mboko’s practice court was lined with more people each day as she slugged through workouts across from a male hitting partner. It became tougher to secure a seat within the in-stadium press gallery at her prime-time night matches.
In the final, Mboko lost the first set but then rallied back to beat Naomi Osaka – her fourth win over a Major champion in the tournament. Mboko’s will, plus the loud pro-Canadian crowd, crushed the spirit of the famous former World No. 1 down the stretch. The Toronto teen skyrocketed in Montreal from a ranking of No. 85 to No. 24. It was Mboko’s first WTA Tour-level title, and it felt like the first of many to come.
– Rachel Brady
Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
Ron Turcotte’s legacy of resilience, kindness and generosity
I met Ron Turcotte once. He’d just been appointed to the Order of New Brunswick, and the provincial Sports Hall of Fame was planning a soiree to mark the occasion. Before the ceremony, I got to do a tour of the place with him. Just the two of us. It remains the closest I’ve ever been to sporting greatness, and I once stood next to Wayne Gretzky while he hugged Snoop Dogg.
If you’ve never heard of him, well, horse racing ain’t what it used to be. But there was a time when Turcotte was an icon. When he rode the thoroughbred racehorse Secretariat to the Triple Crown in 1973, he became a household name and was feted in every major North American publication, from Sports Illustrated, to TIME, to the New York Times. Years later Hollywood would make a major motion picture of their feat.
Ron Turcotte lived to see his hometown of Grand Falls, N.B., erect a statue of his run with Secretariat. He died this summer.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
Beyond his sports achievements, however, Turcotte was a gentleman and an advocate. He was generous with his time and seemed to have genuine appreciation for his fans and well-wishers. After a racing crash left him in a wheelchair, he dedicated the rest of his life to helping other disabled jockeys and people living with spinal injuries. When he died this year at 84, Turcotte left behind a legacy of resilience, kindness and generosity, virtues that always seem to be in short supply.
To mark his passing, I watched his three Triple-Crown victories on YouTube. Go watch the call from the Belmont Stakes that year and try not to shiver.
– Jamie Ross
Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
A championship soccer match in a blizzard puts the CPL under a big spotlight
In the moments before kickoff of the Canadian Premier League final on Nov. 9, the camera caught David Rodríguez, Atlético Ottawa’s Mexican-born midfielder, squinting through a swirling scrim of fat snowflakes and looking faintly bemused, as if questioning his career choices.
By the time the game at Ottawa’s TD Place began, it had been delayed 20 minutes for plowing but a thick white carpet was already piling up again. As play progressed and the windchill hovered around -10C, the picture on TV occasionally whited out, the furrows of snow on the field grew deeper and everything became more madcap.
Officials stopped play several times to shovel out the lines, but everyone in the stadium seemed to embrace the zany spirit of the enterprise – as Atlético’s goalie Nathan Ingham later quipped, it felt like playing at recess.
Atlético Ottawa’s Nathan Ingham picked up a shovel to help clear the field.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
As for the official score line, Cavalry FC struck first, with a loping penalty kick from Fraser Aird. Then, a few minutes later, Rodríguez executed a stunning bicycle kick that OneSoccer’s play-by-play man Adam Jenkins immediately pronounced in an icy scream to be, “The most incredible goal in CPL history!”
Jenkins later acknowledged he didn’t even know in the moment who had scored – he couldn’t really see much from the broadcast booth, and his monitors were buried under a snowdrift. But as more camera angles of the goal emerged, the CPL’s comms department began pumping them out across social media and big sports accounts amplified the highlight, giving the league its first moment of global fame since launching in 2019.
By the time Rodríguez scored again in extra time to seal Atlético’s first North Star Cup victory, even non-soccer fans from Ireland to Australia were joining in the fun online and musing about those crazy Canadians who play soccer in the snow. At a moment in our history when our very sovereignty may depend in part on embracing what makes us distinctive, there are worse things to claim as our own.
– Simon Houpt
Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
An electric Bell Centre at 4 Nations Face-Off
We often talk about the atmosphere in an arena being “electric,” but I had never truly felt that until sitting up in the rafters of Montreal’s Bell Centre before the first meeting of Canada and the U.S. in February.
U.S. President Donald Trump had been in charge a few weeks and his references to Canada becoming the 51st state had become common. That was enough time for shock to become anger. The Montreal crowd booed the American team, the American flag and the American anthem. They even booed figure skater Michelle Kwan, who had the misfortune of introducing the American players.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so Canadian as I did then. You got a small hint of what it is that makes someone run off to enlist.
U.S. player Brady Tkachuk’s fight with Canada’s Sam Bennett was not the only scuffle at the 4 Nations Face-Off on Feb. 15.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Then the fights started. At puck drop, Brandon Hagel fought Matthew Tkachuk. At the second faceoff, Sam Bennett fought Tkachuk’s brother, Brady. They finally got the game started, but it only drifted down to the Canadian net, where Colton Parayko tossed J.T. Miller around for a while. Three fights in nine seconds of game time. I’ve never heard a room like that. Frenzied. Hysterical. Delighted beyond measuring.
For one brief, magical moment, our most cliche Canadian dream of what hockey can and should represent about us matched up with reality.
– Cathal Kelly
Sports in 2026: More from The Globe and MailAhead of the Game podcast
Canada is one of the host countries for the next FIFA World Cup. If you’re nostalgic for the last one in Qatar, you can relive its big showdown between France and Argentina with The Globe’s limited-series podcast from 2022.
Countdown to the Winter Olympics
Olympic hockey arena in Milan has a mess to clean up
After lengthy drought, Canada plots road back to curling gold
Lululemon unveils Team Canada’s uniforms for 2026