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One afternoon last March, with thousands of baseball fans breathing life into the creaking remains of Olympic Stadium in Montreal, a senior Major League Baseball executive was asked what he planned to tell his boss when he returned to work.

“I’m going to tell him that things were better than even I expected,” John McHale Jr., the chief information officer and an executive vice-president, told reporters. “And that I was very, very favourably impressed.”

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An announced crowd of 50,229 was spread across the stands below, watching the second of two pre-season games between the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Mets. A day earlier, more than 46,000 fans had filed into the venue that baseball forgot to watch the opener.

“Mr. McHale is an amazing man,” Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre said a few minutes later. “We were talking about, ‘how do you feel?’ And it was coming back. It was like, we felt the love of the people. We felt the baseball.”