From: several of the eps
Line: “The game is on!”–Sherlock, and sometimes Watson, newspaper headlines, and others
Reference: The line in the original canon is, “the game is afoot,” which we come across first in “Abbey Grange,” and which the Victorian Sherlock says in the infamous Christmas special.
But of course the very first time this catchphrase was uttered in English literature was in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I.