Baseball Is the North American Pastime Now : World Series: Canadians euphoric about Toronto’s victory over Atlanta in six games.

Hundreds of thousands surged into Yonge Street, Toronto’s main north-south artery, early Sunday to celebrate the Blue Jays’ victory over the Atlanta Braves for the world championship.

“We stopped the chop!” or “The chop stops here!” revelers shouted. “That infernal war chant finally died and 50,000 tomahawks suddenly went limp,” noted one of the many stories in Sunday’s Toronto Star.

“You have united a nation behind you, capturing the imagination of Canadians from coast to coast,” Prime Minister Brian Mulroney told the Blue Jays in a congratulatory message.

“I think what it means for Canadians is that, although baseball has been been described as America’s national pastime, it has been played in Canada as long as it has in the United States,” said Mike Fox, a French teacher from northern Ontario.

“I like to think we have earned the grudging respect of Americans, even though it was a team of Americans.”

The victory over Atlanta was particularly sweet because Atlanta beat out Toronto for the 1996 Olympics. Toronto also failed in its bids to attract international exhibitions in 1998 and 2000.

The 51,000-seat SkyDome, home to the Blue Jays and sold out for all but 14 games this year in attracting over 4 million spectators, had more than 45,000 people Saturday night and early Sunday just to watch the game on the big screen. The indoor stadium with the flip-top roof was aflutter with foam rubber blue Js and Canadian flags.

“As far as we know, this is the largest crowd to watch a closed-circuit television event,” said SkyDome Vice President David Garrick.

That “Canada’s Team” is made up of a talented group of Americans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and even one outfielder born in Jamaica, mattered little. The Blue Jays are run by an organization that took an expansion team and built it into a World Series champion in 16 years.

“I’ve seen the Blue Jays win a World Series, so now I can die in peace,” said filmmaker Peter Monet, one of hundreds of patrons at Champs bar in Montreal.

In faraway Vancouver, student Bob Brooks was cheering in the Double Overtime Sports Grill. “They turned our flag upside down. We turned their world upside down.”

He was referring to an incident before Game 2 in Atlanta, when a Marine Corps color guard inadvertently displayed the Canadian flag upside down, disturbing millions of people north of the border.