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Canada’s best had about as close to a day off as you get in Jesse Marsch’s world Wednesday morning. The national team have taken over the training campus of Toronto FC in the city’s northern crust and Matchday-minus-2 was a light session, jogging pace mostly, players doing some limbering, and a lot of looking.

The place is pancake flat, as you’d expect from a disused airport, so looming over the whole area is Rogers Stadium, an outdoor concert venue which rose out of the runway and holds 52,000 people ...for now. Noted poet of life and football Liam Gallagher helped inaugurate it last August when he saluted fans in “those stupid fucking stands up there that were built about 30 fucking minutes ago”.

Rogers Stadium is temporary. The 17,000 seats added to BMO Field downtown to turn it into Toronto Stadium for its World Cup moment this summer are, also, temporary. The getting has been awfully good for the scaffolding men and rivet women of Canada in recent times.

What the football public here crave now and over the next five and a half weeks is something permanent. A legacy which can last. Marsch and his players do too, desperately so. The most gifted squad Canada have ever assembled sometimes talk about having already turned their homeland into a football country. At others they reference it as an ambition. The truth is somewhere in the middle – a work in progress, one which maybe feels closer to its start than finish. Which makes Friday afternoon’s World Cup opener, and all that follows, so precious.

Four years ago Canada’s men made their World Cup return after nearly four decades and it was the most fleeting of things. They were the first country sent home, the only team to join hosts Qatar in putting a zero on the board. John Herdman’s claim that he’d already turned Canada into a football nation looked as naive as his tactics proved on the biggest stage.

“Ahhhh. That was one of our biggest regrets in Qatar,” defender Alistair Johnston told the Guardian this week. “We knew the whole country was right there. We couldn’t give them something to really grasp on to and ride the coat tails of. This summer now, we’re so much more experienced, less naive, less deer in the headlights. We’re ready for this moment and, this time, instead of having to feel that passion halfway around the world, it’s going to be right there in the stands, in the streets.”

Johnston and his teammates felt it up close on Monday with a raucous community training session, hundreds of schoolchildren creating one hell of a din. They were loudest when Canada’s captain came by, “Phonzieee, Phonzieee!” the cry.

Alphonso Davies is the face of this golden generation, a prolific winner with Bayern Munich. In Qatar he scored Canada’s first World Cup goal, the liftoff moment until Croatia scored four in reply. Along with Celtic’s Johnston, Jonathan David at Juventus, Tajon Buchanan and Tani Oluwaseyi at Villarreal, Ismaël Koné at Sassuolo and a clutch of others, Davies spends his club days among Europe’s upper end. In two whirlwind years under Marsch, upwards of a third of this squad have earned moves from MLS to Europe or from smaller European outposts into big five leagues.

Interest has grown and grown. The run to the Copa América semi-finals months after Marsch took charge relit the fire after the post-Qatar lull. The American’s magnetism and willingness to push back against US President Donald Trump’s 51st State rhetoric won new fans. Expectations have risen and so a team that under Herdman carried a ceremonial sword as a symbol (gimmick?) of their warrior spirit now find themselves with a double-edged one.

As co-hosts, the draw and schedule was soft and favourable. In Group B, Marsch’s team kicks off against Bosnia and Herzegovina here Friday before making for Vancouver to face Qatar and Switzerland. A golden path, staying home through two knockout rounds, is on offer if they can top the group. Marsch has spoken of achieving that goal, of his “people’s team lighting the country on fire”.

Recently, the team’s profile has rocketed anew. Rapper Drake designed Nike tournament tracksuits for them. Canadian NHL and NFL stars attended training last week in Montreal. Prime minister Mark Carney has been in the dressing room. Actor Simu Liu, singer Alanis Morissette and hockey hero Sidney Crosby are ambassadors. It’s head-spinning; not long ago, Canada Soccer had to pay TV networks just to show national team games.

Crosby gave Canada its signature sporting national team moment with his Olympic golden goal in 2010. It’s what Johnston and others have pointed to when they speak about legacy.

Yet as their moment finally approaches, things around the team feel as if they’ve tightened slightly. Davies’s fitness is a fragile thing. Friday will come too soon for him. Moïse Bombito, Canada’s best defender and a key piece of the high-pressure, high-risk Marsch system, could be ruled out of the entire tournament on its eve. Luc de Fougerolles, a 20-year-old veteran of just 44 games of professional football, will slot in to replace him. Scoring from open play has become a huge issue – it’s happened just twice in the last nine games. On Friday night against Ireland, Canada created countless chances and butchered a buffet’s worth.

Marsch began his post-match press conference with a directive: “I’m going to be positive, guys … if you ask me negative questions, I’ll move on.”

Not quite the walls closing in but a sense of something shifting. When playmaker Koné skipped Wednesday’s training there was a brief panic of further serious injury issues, even a disciplinary problem. The fever pit that is the online community of Canadian football was briefly afire. It turned out to be, well, fever.

Marsch likes his team to play with a chip on its shoulder. He certainly has one from being spurned by US Soccer for its own head coach opening. No first goal at this World Cup looms larger than the one in Friday’s home opener. Marsch has insisted Canada will score it. After that the firsts line up to be knocked down: a first tournament point, a maiden win, a first knockout game, even a first knockout victory. Getting to the last 32 feels like a bare minimum for this home summer to be remembered as a success.

Perhaps the last-minute jitteriness is both natural and, ultimately, temporary too. Overcoming it is essential if Marsch and Canada are to make their point a permanent one.