The longest fan boycott in sports ended yesterday as 31,395 people braved the concrete bowels of Olympic Stadium to bid adieu to the Montreal Expos, who will play in Washington, D.C., next season. The last home game in Expos history may have produced the largest crowd of the season, but many fans of the team said their goodbyes long ago.

For years, it has been taken for granted in baseball circles that the sport was doomed to fail in Montreal. Yet the franchise thrived throughout much of its history, fielding exciting, speedy teams that captured fans’ imagination. In the past few years, they have indeed been drawing miniscule crowds – averaging around 9,000 this year – but this is unsurprising, considering Major League Baseball’s repeated attempts to eliminate the team

since taking ownership of it three years ago. Would you buy season tickets to see a team that played a quarter of its home games in another country?

The Expos weren’t always baseball’s orphans, of course. In 1994, when the strike wiped out the last two months of the season, the Expos had the best record in baseball and were odds-on favorites to win the World Series. A decade later they are history. The 1994 Expos are remembered as the great might-have-been. But it is important also to remember what was.

The Expos were born in 1969 amid a wave of national self-confidence sweeping Quebec. Like the 1967 World’s Fair for which they were named, the Expos represented Montreal’s arrival on the world stage, a major milestone in the modernization of Quebec society. The new team, playing in cozy Jarry Park, was christened Nos Amours – “our loved ones” – and Rusty “Le Grand Orange” Staub soon earned levels of adulation normally reserved for hockey heroes.

As someone who became an Expos fan in the early 1980s, my defining memory is not of lone heckles echoing through an empty stadium, but of Tim Raines sliding into home in front of 35,000 screaming fans. Two million a year flocked to the “Big O” in those days, when Raines, Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, and Co. threatened to become the team of the decade.

“This was probably one of the loudest places to play in baseball for a long period of time,” Raines, now an instructor with the team, told the Associated Press yesterday. “We had a lot of great players, the fans enjoyed the game, they came and had fun and it was enjoyable to be here. You knew the fans were going to come and cheer hard.”

The Expos made it to within one game of the World Series in 1981, but the dynasty never materialized – Carter went on to win a World Series with the Mets, Dawson won an MVP award with the Cubs the year after he left Montreal. The franchise seemed to hit a low point in 1991, when a 55-ton concrete beam of the Big O collapsed and the last-place Expos played the final month of the season on the road. But structural engineers rebuilt the stadium, and the Expos hired Felipe Alou to help rebuild the team.

The plan worked, and by 1993 the Expos were baseball’s most promising team. Montrealers were already in a winning mood after the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup victory that spring, and the Expos, led by Delino Deshields, Marquis Grissom, and Larry Walker, electrified fans with an arsenal of double steals, delayed steals, and suicide squeeze plays. That team stole 228 bases – a number no team has reached since.

The Expos also put together a spectacular late-season run, closing from 14 1 /2 games behind the first-place Phillies on August 20 to within three games a month later. I attended the opening game of a crucial late-September series against Philadelphia, when 45,000 of the Big O’s yellow plastic seats were filled. The Expos won, 8-7, on a 12th-inning sacrifice fly, but the defining moment came in the seventh inning, when Curtis Pride, a deaf career minor-leaguer, hit a pinch-hit, two-run double. As the Phillies made a pitching change and Pride stood at second base, a roaring ovation reverberated around the concrete bowl with such intensity that Pride said later he had felt the vibrations in his chest.

“The way they kept cheering,” former Expos third-base coach Jerry Manuel told the Montreal Gazette at the time, “it’s as if the crowd wanted to break a barrier. They wanted to him to know how they felt, to get beyond the wall. That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”

That love affair seems a long-forgotten dream for the current crop of Expos. Nobody likes sitting inside a grimy cinderblock on a warm summer evening, and the decrepit Big O has become a thoroughly depressing venue in recent years.

The stadium has also been a tremendous drain on the city of Montreal. The basic structure was built for the 1976 Olympics as a paragon of ultramodern sports architecture. It took another decade to erect a leaning tower that would raise and lower the retractable Kevlar roof, but the reverse-umbrella concept never worked: The roof has remained closed while taxpayers have spent than $200 million fixing rips and tears.

Even more damaging were the financial policies of the ownership group led by Claude Brochu. Though 40,000 fans attended the last home game of 1994, Brochu refused to invest in the team’s talent, and the first of many fire sales ensued. Walker, Grissom, and John Wetteland left as free agents or were traded that winter. Moises Alou, Pedro Martinez, and Vladimir Guerrero later joined the procession of All-Stars leaving town. With each one, baseball lost another piece of Montrealers’ trust.

Plans to build a taxpayer-financed retropark were proposed, and the backlash grew even stronger – the idea of corporate welfare in semi-socialist Quebec seemed especially odious after the lack of loyalty Expos ownership had shown its fans.

A new owner, Jeffrey Loria, took control in 1999 and promptly cancelled English television and radio broadcasts. His former partners have accused Loria of deliberately devalued the franchise in order to gain leverage for the purchase of the Florida Marlins, and a racketeering suit is pending.

By then, the majority of Montrealers, including die-hard fans, had tuned out their baseball team. Fond memories remain: Raines beating out an infield single, powerful thighs pounding the turf; Dennis Martinez, clad in baby blue, throwing his arms skyward after pitching a perfect game; a lanky Guerrero reaching for a slider in the dirt, and driving it for an opposite field homer. But after years of waiting on broken promises, this Expos fan is ready to say goodbye.