BALTIMORE, Maryland -- In Monday's editions of the Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in Canada, the headline on the story of the Baltimore Canadian Football League team's victory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was: "Oh, Canada: U.S. Team Eyes Our Grey Cup." The first line of the story: "Is nothing sacred?"


That afternoon, on a nationally televised talk show, a Toronto sportswriter said he was rooting for the British Columbia Lions to win Sunday because he wanted the Grey Cup to remain in Canada. He was not being facetious. None of the other panelists on the show blinked. Clearly, the sentiment was not out of line to them.


And no, this wave of Canadian jingoism is not just a creation of media types searching for an angle to hype the end of the Canadian Football League season. Those were regular folks throwing snowballs and taunting the CFLs with upside-down American flags in Winnipeg. That was a member of Canada's House of Commons discussing the issue Tuesday, as though it were Topic A in the Great White North.


Indeed, there are many, many people in Canada who are dead serious about rooting for Baltimore to lose Sunday simply because the team is the first from an American city to play in the championship game.


The root of this passion is easily discerned. In a country that struggles to maintain an identity in the shadow of the United States, yet believes it has a superior culture in many ways, the CFL had long stood as a symbol of independence from the States, one of the increasingly rare institutions that was distinctly Canadian. The CFL game was different from the NFL, and even if many CFL players were American, a quota system maintained a strong Canadian presence. But now the league is undergoing a revolution of sorts -- an American revolution -- and it is striking a nerve.


The CFL has put four teams in the States in the past two years -- Baltimore; Las Vegas; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Sacramento, California -- and this week a new expansion franchise will be awarded to Memphis. San Antonio, Birmingham, Milwaukee, Hartford and Long Island have been mentioned as possible sites for another franchise. That would bring the total number of teams in the CFL to 14, eight of them Canadian and six American.


There is talk, too, that the Canadian player quota will be lowered and the rules will be Americanized. This succeeds in stirring the fear and anger that some Canadians harbor toward the United States, which many Canadians view as a powerful, overwhelming and somewhat troubled big brother. Baltimore's presence in the Grey Cup is just a neat way to sum up all this conflict.


On a logical level, it makes no sense for them to get so upset. The CFL was in dire straits before commissioner Larry Smith decided to Americanize the product in 1992. Each of the league's eight Canadian franchises reportedly lost money in 1993. Expanding to America has brought new life to a dying league. It had to happen. That is why the CFL Players' Association has given a thumbs-up to U.S. expansion, even though there will be fewer jobs for Canadian players. Some jobs are better than no jobs.


But this heated response to Baltimore's presence in the Grey Cup is not founded on such cold, logical thinking. It is coming from the gut. Hey, the CFL still awards a Most Valuable Canadian award at the Grey Cup. The fans' response to the CFLs' making the Grey Cup is an emotional reply to what they perceive as a robbing of their sporting soul.


Maybe, to an average American sports fan sitting here, it seems silly to suggest that any pro team's victory could somehow affect nationalism. In the United States, profewssional sports comes down to city versus city, not country versus country. No one cared when the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series, the championship of the supposed American national pastime. Oh, maybe a few people cared. But hardly any.


These matters are far more delicate in Canada, though, because Canada's professional-sports identity was long ago submerged into America's. Their best baseball towns joined the U.S. major leagues. The National Hockey League is headquartered in New York; now; it even has an American commissioner, and teams in Florida and California. The National Basketball Association is coming to Toronto and Vancouver.


Thus, you have an entire country that framed the Blue Jays' World Series victories in national colors, and believes that the United States did, too. As former CFL player Jim Silye, a member of Canada's House of Commons, said Tuesday, "The Blue Jays steal the World Series, and the Americans are just shaking their heads and saying, 'How can Canada take our baseball championship?' Now, there's an opportunity for the States to take our Grey Cup."


If only there were one person down here who actually thought that way.