WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Just how ingrained is breakfast club, the drunken football season tradition of dressing up in costumes and partying at West Lafayette Village bars, into the fabric of the Purdue game day experience?

Try this one on: When Purdue scheduled its home opener on Friday night – the first under newly installed, permanent lighting at Ross-Ade Stadium – the question had to be asked of the collection of bars in the West Lafayette Village …

“We did confirm that nobody is planning a breakfast club on Friday morning,” West Lafayette Police Chief Jason Dombkowski said this week, reporting back after meeting with the Campus Community Bar Retail Coalition.

“There were some taverns considering that,” Dombkowski said. “And we discouraged them, I think, that allowing Purdue students to actually go to class on Friday morning would be a good thing.”

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Mike Tilstra, manager at Brothers Bar and Grill at 306 W. State St., said he was among those who gave in to the sort of logic Dombkowski offered, deferring the kickoff of breakfast club until the start of the second home game.

“We had heard some of the other places in the Village talking about maybe doing it, so it had crossed our mind,” Tilstra said. “In the end, it wasn’t going to be fair to the other businesses around us – the banks and the stores. … Saturdays are one thing. It seemed a little too much to try to pull that off on a Friday morning.”

Upshot: Go to class Friday morning. The bars will be open after Purdue’s 8 p.m. game against Ohio University.

Costume: Optional.

(And if beer is the sticking point here, Purdue and People’s Brewing Co. will have the debut of Boiler Gold American Golden Ale at the stadium. So, there’s that.)

But speaking of second home games, that deferred breakfast club home opener will come with a new look State Street – sans vehicles.

For the Sept. 23 Homecoming game against Michigan, West Lafayette will test drive a feature of the new, two-way reconfiguration of State Street that can turn a portion of the Village into a temporary pedestrian-only plaza.

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The streets entering the Village – on State near Chauncey Avenue, on Northwestern near Columbia Street, and on State near Pierce Street – are equipped with fittings that accept bollard posts to block traffic from roughly Chauncey Hill Mall to Harry’s Chocolate Shop.

In other words, prime breakfast club real estate.

“We didn’t want to do it on a Friday night game, certainly not on the first home game of the year,” said Erik Carlson, West Lafayette’s development director. “The Michigan game will be a pretty good test.”

The idea, Carlson said, will be close traffic early Saturday, let pre-game action happen in the Village and then pull up the posts after the start of the game. (The Purdue-Michigan game will start at either 3:30 p.m. or 4 p.m., still to be determined.) Carlson said details were still be hammered out.

“If it’s not going well, if it doesn’t pan out, if businesses don’t like it, if people coming to the Village have problems with it, we’ll rethink how we’re doing it,” Carlson said. “But we’re looking forward to seeing what we can do with this.”

Before that, this week, railings are being installed along State Street sidewalks throughout the Village to limit the number pedestrian crossings on the newly reconfigured, two-way traffic pattern. The railings are just one of the features of a $120 million State Street Project, a joint production of West Lafayette and Purdue University. The railings also replace the hideous orange-and-white barricades the city installed for football weekends to keep safe the surge of foot traffic during every breakfast club.

How will it all change the face of breakfast club?

Tilstra said he’d wait for those details being worked out to be sure, though he said it sounded safer for breakfast club to keep traffic clear. (“You really don’t want to be trolling through here in a car at noon on a Saturday if you don’t have to be,” he said.)

“We’re all looking forward to finding out,” Tilstra said.

Just not on a Friday morning. Even breakfast club, best experienced in its natural habitat of a Saturday morning, has its limits.

Reach J&C columnist Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@gannett.com.