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Tate Angelkovski and her father, George, had asked one of the workers how many people entered the grounds before them. “Oh,” the worker told them, “you’re the second.”

They did not mind.

“There’s always someone who’s going to have a negative spin,” George Angelkovski said. “We have to offer our athletes somewhere to play.”

With the official opening ceremony only days away, organizers are flush with hundreds of thousands of unsold tickets. The scene on Tuesday — water polo is among five sports to begin play before the flame is lit on Friday — will likely not be an outlier this month.

And none of that seems to concern the local organizing committee, which has conceded it never expected to sell all 1.2 million available tickets. The key, it has argued, is not with the audience, but with the stages themselves, and the fact those stages have been built.

“One of the reasons we chased after, and wanted to be a part of the Pan Am Games, was the fact that this building is ours after it’s over,” Markham mayor Frank Scarpitti said as he hustled into the pool area during the opening game.

The swimming pool in Markham is part of a vast, multi-purpose facility built in the heart of a broader development project in the city. It will also host the badminton and the table tennis events at the Pan Am Games, all at a cost of $78.5 million.