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UPDATE: Sunday's wild-card playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers sold out Friday.

With forecasters warning of Ice Bowl-like temperatures at Lambeau Field on Sunday, the National Football League on Thursday agreed to give the Green Bay Packers another day to sell the remaining 3,000 tickets to Sunday's wild-card playoff game in order to avoid a TV blackout.

The franchise now has until 4 p.m. Friday to sell the tickets or face a TV blackout in the Milwaukee, Green Bay and Wausau markets. The last time a Packers game was blacked out was an NFC first-round playoff against the St. Louis Cardinals on Jan. 8, 1983.

The inability of the Packers to sell out a playoff game and the NFL's decision to give the Packers more time is astonishing for a storied franchise accustomed to packing Lambeau Field on game day. This year, the team added 7,000 more seats, bringing capacity to 80,750, third most in the league.

The ticket situation is all the more remarkable because of the reputation fans have for braving all kinds of weather. Sunday's forecast, however, is flirting with history, with 5 below zero expected by kickoff, and wind chills as low as 30 below. Further, game time is 3:40 p.m., meaning the sun will be fading fast. While the addition of the new seats does cut the wind inside the stadium bowl, many fans may simply be opting for the warmth of the living room instead of the excitement of being at the game in person.

"The weather will be a challenge," said team spokesman Aaron Popkey.

According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the temperature at game time for the Ice Bowl on Dec. 31, 1967, was 13 below zero. More recently, the Jan. 20, 2008, playoff game between the Packers and the New York Giants was 3 below with a wind chill of 24 below.

Asked if the Packers had reached out to corporate sponsors to buy up the remaining inventory, Popkey said the franchise's focus was on selling tickets. "We have seen consistent movement of sales. We are hopeful we can sell the rest of them by tomorrow," Popkey said.

The face value of the tickets in the seating bowl is between $102 and $125, depending on seat location. The NFL sets the prices. On the secondary ticket market, prices are hovering at face value. Mike Holzberger of Connections Ticket Service said tickets he is selling were bought from season-ticket holders. He said he was reselling them at or near face value.

"Right now we are focusing on selling premium seats at a modest markup over face value, $125," Holzberger said in an email.

Change in policy

The surprising turn of events can be traced, in part, to a new ticket policy and the team's poor play late in the season, which dampened interest among season-ticket holders reluctant to commit ahead of time to playoff tickets.

This week, the Packers marketing staff aggressively marketed the matchup, asking fans to keep the stadium full of Packers fans, not 49ers fans. Emails went out to season-ticket holders and through Ticketmaster, the team's official ticket seller. In addition, the franchise had solicitations on Twitter and on its own website.

On Monday, the team had 40,000 seats to sell, and it has been trimming the unsold inventory little by little since then.

Chris Matcovich, a spokesman for TiqIQ.com, an online ticket search engine, said 6% of his firm's sales had come from California, and 14% of visitors to the game's event page had been California residents.

"Definitely more activity from SF fans than we expected, and that's likely attributable to it being as surprisingly easy as it's been to get face-value tickets." said Connor Gregoire, a spokesman for SeatGeek.com, a ticket search engine.

He said the average resale price for the game had fallen every day since Sunday to a low of $140 per ticket on Thursday. That's down 47% from Sunday.

Leading up to Sunday's game, there was some grumbling among Packers season-ticket holders about the new ticket policy, which was announced late in November after the Packers were overwhelmed by the Detroit Lions, 40-10, on Thanksgiving Day.

Under the new policy, season-ticket holders were given the opportunity to buy their allotment of up to four playoff tickets. They had to pay in advance for two playoff games, pay for the highest-priced seats and pay a handling fee. Had the Packers not made the playoffs, the money would have been applied to next year's season tickets.

In other words, fans were looking at committing more than $1,000 with the very real possibility at the time that the money would simply be held by the Packers until the bill for next year's tickets came due.

In previous years, fans had the option of getting the money refunded — and half of all season ticket holders did that, a team official said.