It was a chance they'd been asking for for weeks, an opportunity to make a bold statement that they were on a run and legitimately in contention for a playoff berth, that some mysterious corner had been turned and all the Raptors really had to do was play hard.
They had to hustle and move the ball, to play with passion and purpose. They had to be decisive and dominant and show the team they are chasing that they mean business when they talk about the grandiose plans they have for the final quarter of the NBA regular season. But, no.
No passion, little hustle, very little purpose and enough technical breakdowns to send coaches to the medicine cabinet for headache cures.
The only statement to come out of the Air Canada Centre last night was: We're still not good enough consistently enough.
Seeing a three-game winning streak come to an end and blowing a chance to move up in the standings, the Raptors capitulated to the Milwaukee Bucks to the tune of 96-85 in a game that really wasn't that close.
"We (told) our guys, 'We can't be outworked in this game,' and we were," said coach Jay Triano.
And there's really not much more anyone can offer.
The Raptors scored 30 points in the first quarter and 29 in the next two combined. They shot 60 per cent in the first quarter and 31 per cent in the next two combined. They didn't particularly hustle, they didn't particularly run their offence with precision, they didn't particularly defend with any great sense of purpose.
It was a big game.
And they came up small.
"We had three victories and we wanted to get on a roll and play well but we faced a team that obviously looked like and played like they wanted it more," said Triano.
Yes, there was the obligatory fourth-quarter run that got Toronto within eight with four minutes to go, but that was more fool's gold than anything.
Yes, there were some mystifying calls by the officials, but to think the refs decided the game would do a disservice to Toronto's overall play.
But there were also 26 points and a season-high 13 rebounds from Milwaukee's Charlie Villanueva, who scorched his former team again.
And there were just 16 points from Andrea Bargnani, who had 13 of them by scorching Villanueva's porous defence in the first nine minutes before going scoreless until midway through the fourth.
"I think that's more me, trying to manage his minutes," Triano said of the reason for Bargnani's disappearance. "Maybe (I should) leave a guy in when he's rolling a little bit. If a guy's tired, you know you can't leave him in the whole game, you've got to give him a blow, but I'll take responsibility for that, it kind of throws him out a bit."
On a night full of contentious calls, the most hotly disputed was an offensive foul call on Jermaine O'Neal with about seven minutes left. The Raptor centre was called by referee Monte McCutchen for driving his knee into a defender on a move to the basket and O'Neal picked up a technical for arguing the seldom-seen call.
O'Neal picked up his second technical - and got an automatic ejection - with two minutes left after a little chat session with Milwaukee's Andrew Bogut and Villanueva.
Triano didn't mind the ejection.
"I guess we have to reinvent how we do layups because you're not allowed to lift your knee. We teach grade-school kids in Canada how to do layups and you lift the opposite leg that you take off from. We have to change that because it's not allowed any more."
The game had been billed as significant because Milwaukee began the night in eighth place in the East but only two games up on Toronto.
The Bucks and Raptors had also split two earlier meetings and the first tiebreaker at the end of the regular season is head-to-head records, which the Bucks now cannot lose to the Raptors, leading the season series 2-1 with one game remaining.
