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The weather was early-summer heaven, one of those evenings you just had to be outside.

The game featured the 1-0 Blue Bombers, with a roster as stacked as it’s been in years, taking on their longtime West Division rival from Edmonton, unbeaten in two games.

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A match made in early-season heaven, too.

Yet I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell there were nearly 8,000 empty seats at the football palace in south Winnipeg, Thursday night.

Now, there are two ways to look at this. You can focus on the empty ones or the full ones.

After all, a crowd of 25,336 is healthy in today’s CFL.

Thursday’s gathering was one of the largest in the loop in this young season. Granted, there hasn’t been a game in Regina, yet.

“I’m not worried about the 8,000,” Bombers president/CEO Wade Miller said. “Our philosophy is fan first, one at a time, every time. We’re going to build it that way.”

Miller and his staff seem to be pretty innovate in their approach.

Since moving into their new digs, they’d noticed some fans liked to buy tickets in the cheap seats, then make their way down to the north end zone concourse toward the Rum Hut and mingle for the entire game.

So they ripped out some seats and came up with something called a social pass — basically a ticket to a standing area — the first of its kind in Canada, Miller says.

“We’ll have 250 of those a game,” he said. “And you get your first drink with that.”

Those fans got a good look at Winnipegger Nic Demski’s back-to-back runs in the first quarter, a 35-yard burst and a 10-yarder into the north end zone for the Bombers’ first touchdown.