Rogers Communications Inc. is buying BCE Inc.’s 37.5% stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. for C$4.7 billion ($3.5 billion), giving the telecommunications giant a majority stake in the sports company whose most valuable assets include the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey club and the Toronto Raptors.

For over a decade, all of Toronto’s sport teams were owned by two telecommunications companies: Bell and Rogers. But that has changed with today's massive announcement.

From the moment it happened in 2011, the partnership seemed like a lower-stakes, modern-day version of mutually assured destruction: Bell Canada Enterprises and Rogers Communications, each other’s primary competitors, coming together to buy a majority share of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE).