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All championship experiences in sports are not created equal.

When a team is a pre-season favourite, or spends the most money, or is stacked with the best players in the game, it's never quite as special.

This is why the Kansas City Royals, who finally dropped a post-season game by losing 7-1 to San Francisco in the opening game of the World Series Tuesday night, have a chance to go down in baseball history as one of the more remarkable champions of this generation.

Already the Royals have made winning look more fun than anyone else in sports.

The Royals don’t just celebrate like millionaire athletes. They have that pinch-me-I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening-and-it-reminds-me-of-what-it-felt-like-to-be-a-kid-again kind of fun.

They buy rounds of drinks for their fans in bars after games, they have a player who gave out playoff tickets to a fan on Twitter and agreed to go to dinner with him.

It’s become fashionable in sports for players to place winning championships above all else in sports. The standard answer as to where an athlete should want to play? Why wherever gives him the best chance to win a championship, of course.

Teams such as the New York Yankees have used that selling point since the dawn of free agency in the 1970s, with baseball’s other big spenders such as the Angels, Boston, or the Dodgers also opening their wallets to do what some might call invest in talent, and what others might call buy a winner.

Even in a salary cap league like the NBA, we saw The Big Three Found set things up, not just so that they would be able to play together, but so they could win a string of championships. That’s what it was all about and to a degree it worked.

But the thrill of victory is never what it could be when one celebrates the accomplishments of a team that had the deck stacked in its favour before the season even began.

The Heat winning two championships was maybe good for the NBA. But there was hardly anything magical about it, no sense of witnessing something that made you remember where you were when…

It’s just a fact of life that the greatest celebrations in sports are always those that seem the least likely, the emotional energy inversely proportional to the likelihood of it occurring, for both participants and spectators.

The greatest celebration I can recall ever seeing in sports? Probably the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team in what became known as the “miracle on ice,” a scene that appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine without a headline. The scene simply spoke for itself.

The Royals aren’t quite that kind of story but their journey thus far does feel different.

There’s a little more unbridled joy, a little more enjoy-it-while-it-lasts.

Yes the Royals remind us that even in professional sports, there are different degrees of joy.