Calgary Stampeders players Jabari Arthur, Quincy Butler and Marvin White meet fans and sign autographs prior to the annual CFL Labour Day Classic game between the Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary Stampeders in Calgary in September 2012. (Photo: Larry MacDougal/CFL)

It is a steamy July afternoon in Hamilton, Ont. On a scorched field near creaky Ivor Wynne Stadium, football coaches and parents from nearby Welland prepare sausages on propane barbecues and sip whoknows- what from red plastic cups. Earlier today their Peewee- and Atom-aged players had the run of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ field. Now, the children are parading the Niagara Regional Minor Football Association’s banner around the tailgate party inside a fenced-off park, much to the delight of the fans revving up for a game against the rival Toronto Argonauts.

“The kids are having a blast,” says first-year junior coach Tim Puttman. “I’ve been down to Buffalo Bills games, but it’s more of an adult thing. Here, it seems more family-oriented.”

Now, it is almost game time at Ivor Wynne. With the player introductions set to begin, the stands are about two-thirds full, and beyond the bleachers to the west, the steel plant smokestacks belch grey plumes over Lake Ontario. Cheerleaders form an aisle near the end zone, and the Ticats starting players jog through one by one, followed by the rest of the team, their entrance punctuated by fireworks shot out of a machine on the field.

Welland’s young football players spring into action, hurrying to stretch a giant Canadian flag across the football field just as a singer begins the national anthem.

True patriot love . . .

Junior cheerleaders in shimmering gold tops scurry to their posts on the field. They crouch as the Atoms hurriedly haul the flag over them. Remarkably, not a single girl is bowled over as the flag is pulled from one 10-yard line to the next. Working together, the cheerleaders bob beneath the flag and the players pump their arms to create a wave motion until the anthem concludes.

There’s a quaint informality to this production compared with the flawless choreography on display at a National Football League (NFL) game in the United States, even in the league’s hinterland of Orchard Park, New York, home to the Buffalo Bills and just an hour’s drive from Ivor Wynne.

And perhaps this is the way it should be. Although the administration of Canadian Football League (CFL) commissioner Mark Cohon and a strong group of owners are managing the league with slick professionalism, the Bull Durham moments dotting CFL history have always been front and centre. Only in the CFL would you hear of a team drafting a deceased player, of a general manager boasting about his closet full of shoes and challenging a reporter to a boxing match in the same radio session, of one franchise’s nickname being “Roughriders” while another’s was “Rough Riders,” of a grocery store chain sponsoring a contest on a national broadcast even though the chain has stores only in the West, of a newspaper revealing that the owner of one team also owns another.

Amazingly, after the near-bankrupting expansion into the United States in the first half of the 1990s, the CFL is doing just fine and dandy. Television ratings are up; attendance is stable. The league has compensated for its public relations gaffes with an often exciting brand of football featuring pass-happy offences — touch football in pads. In the early part of the 2012 season, scoring, at an average of 55 points per game, had increased 10 percent over 2011. More than 63 percent of the games were decided in the final three minutes, and seven of the first 16 games ended with a margin of four points or less. The CFL is in the midst of a resurgence that would have seemed highly improbable 10 years ago and, outside of Toronto, is enjoying an uncharacteristically long run of stability.

“In tough times, there is no substitute for tradition and track record,” says Brad Pelletier, a sports marketing expert. “When the economy was red-hot, the CFL was on weaker ground. Now the economy is challenged, and the CFL is on solid ground. There’s less competition for the dollar, and people gravitate to admired brands when times are tough.”

This November, the CFL celebrates its history by staging its 100th Grey Cup game, in the city that gives its local football team the least support of any franchise: Toronto. The Argonauts drew barely 20,000 fans on average last season, down one-third since 2005. Crowds are sparse at the Rogers Centre this year as well. Professional sports leagues, says Pelletier, are obligated to prop up their weakest franchises, and Toronto now qualifies as the weak link.

Toronto as a locale makes business and historical sense. The majority of Grey Cups have been held in the city, starting in 1909 in what is now Rosedale Park. The league is trying to get the most out of Grey Cup attention by pouring $1 million worth of promotion into the southern Ontario area, where the existing CFL fan base hardly reflects the young and multicultural makeup of this part of the province.

The game will deliver a slice of Canadiana. “Nothing brings Canadians together quite like the Grey Cup,” says CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon. “It’s more than our national championship. It’s a national pilgrimage. Thousands come each year in person, and millions join them through television, to celebrate something that is uniquely, intensely and proudly ours.”

Back at the pre-game party outside Ivor Wynne, the Welland youths parade a team banner past a group of tailgaters known as CFL Fans Fight Cancer. They are selling scarves and similar products, with the Ticats’ co-operation, to raise funds for Welland House, a cancer-care facility. On this day, a husband and wife have driven in from Winnipeg to support the cause. Several Argo fans indulge in a coronary- tempting concoction called a “bacon explosion,” which consists of cheese, sausage and several layers of bacon, all washed down with chilled beer from the cooler. They’re grateful that the police have exempted this fenced-in field from tough open-container laws that put a damper on traditional tailgating festivities.

“This is a way for people across Canada to come together,” says Ken Mitchell, who works with Welland House. “We have a difference of opinion for three hours. It’s a big community event. And we’ll go to Toronto too, have dinner and talk football.”

Inevitably here in southern Ontario, talk about Canadian football turns to the American game and the NFL. It has been this way ever since 1874, when Harvard smacked McGill in home-and-home games played under rugby-like rules. Canadian football is defined by how it is different from the American variety: a longer and wider field; a plumper ball; three downs instead of four; and a rule stipulating that 20 players on the 42-man playing roster must be Canadian or at the least, begat by Canadian parents.

Canadian football is tethered to its American counterpart, first as a source of talent — in a TSN poll, 39 of the league’s all-time 50 greatest players were American — and second as an indirect competitor. The CFL’s expansion into U.S. cities such as Sacramento and San Antonio in the 1990s taxed the league to such a state that a $3 million interest-free loan from the NFL was needed in 1997 to keep the CFL afloat. As recently as four years ago, the CFL proposed that the NFL take an ownership stake in the league.

Ultimately, the CFL can always pull the nationalism card from the bottom of the deck. Even if we don’t actually watch the CFL religiously, there is the tendency to push back when a threat is apparent. There’s a feet-shuffling sheepishness about supporting a game that could be the first bullet in the gun that kills the CFL. The league has unashamedly tapped into the patriotic sentiment with its marketing slogans: “Radically Canadian” and, the most recent, “This Is Our League.”

Standing on the hard-baked field, Jason Allan wears a plaid kilt in the Ticats yellow and black team colours and a black T-shirt with letters on the back spelling Box J Boys. He is positioned beneath a beige canopy that is erected in the same place before every Tiger-Cats home game, carving a roast pig that has been cooked in herbs, hot peppers and a lot of garlic. Around him, men wearing the group’s signature T-shirt drink beer, laugh, eat and goad.

“We let Argo fans in here too,” says Allan mischievously. “Just toss a little cyanide in their food.”

Allan helped form the Box J Boys in 1992 when the Tiger-Cats desperately needed community support, with the club facing apparent extinction due to financial woes. It’s a tightly restricted group, with 20 members now, friends of friends, and on this day, they are accompanied by women and children. Back then, the Box J Boys could have written off the Ticats and simply become loyal Buffalo Bills fans, setting up the barbecue on Sundays in Orchard Park.

“The franchise was in dire need back then,” says Allan. “But that’s when fans need to get together to support their team. I find tradition is the first thing that goes. We’re bringing the little ones in now, so when we get older, they can cook for us.”

He pauses an instant, flicks some pork into an aluminum tray, smiles.

“The CFL is different,” he says. “I look on the league as a homecoming, with extended family and friends across the country. They don’t get that community feeling in the States like we do here.”