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There have been more than a few failed reinventions of the Toronto Argonauts over the past quarter century or so.

Not all were abysmal efforts, at least right away. But in the end, each and every attempt at making the Argos matter more to Toronto sports fans has ended in frustration and surrender.

Which brings us to the summer of 2016 and the Argonauts launch of their first season at BMO Field, a place from which they’d been barred before MLSE chairman Larry Tanenbaum and Bell formed a partnership to buy the team last spring.

There’s an opportunity here.

Debating just how big that opportunity is and how best to exploit it are what the city’s small legion of hardcore Canadian Football League fans have been pondering through the run-up to this season.

It’s been an awfully long time since the Argonauts really mattered in football terms to Torontonians, so the organization can’t really play the “remember when” card to the current generation.

And marketing CFL football itself to a cynical population of mostly NFL fans isn’t going to stand much of a shot either.

So the Argonauts are instead selling the one thing they haven’t been able to deliver to fans since the glory days of the 1970s and 80s when throngs used to pack old Exhibition Stadium.

They’re selling the experience.

In football, the fan experience can be as important as anything that happens on the field. The most iconic venues in the sport at any level — CFL, NFL, or NCAA — tend to be places where the energy level is off the chart.

Fans who’ve visited those places may not forever recall what happened on the field that day, but they’ll surely recall what it felt like to be there.

There are all kinds of reasons why the Argonauts don’t occupy the same place they place they once did in Toronto, from increased competition in the marketplace to the CFL’s own various struggles.

But it sure hasn’t helped that while the Argonauts have been struggling for relevance, Rogers Centre football delivered one of the saddest fan experiences anywhere, the antithesis of what going to a football game is supposed to feel like.

Undersized crowds in a stale, characterless environment; all of it feeding the passivity of the fans who wound up feeling as though they were watching football in a shopping mall.

In fact, to try and make someone an Argonauts fan, the last thing you would do was take them to a game.

That’s why even the occasional peak in interest, such as the Argos winning the 100th Grey Cup game in 2012 before 50,000 fans at the Rogers Centre, proved to be merely a blip. For when the smoke had cleared and the Argos tried to harness that excitement for the next season, they were still left selling the same unappealing antiseptic football experience as always.

The Argonauts are promising things are different, a message they’ve been delivering via promotional ads this spring. There’s not a mention of football, no highlighting the team’s stars or its prospects for the season.

No, this is all about fun, going after not so much football fans as much as fans of a good time. In the process, they hope to flip the demographic to a younger, hipper crowd, with a brighter future and more disposable income than those dwindling numbers of fans still holding on from the 1980s.

Can that really be done in Toronto, where the level of cynicism about three-down football is significantly higher than anywhere else, including big cities like Vancouver and Montreal?

It’s fair to suggest it won’t be a quick fix, not with more than a generation of Torontonians having grown up not caring very much about the Argos or the CFL.

There’s going to have to be a slow build here, one built on tailgating, and enthusiastic stadium atmosphere that turn those nine dates a year at BMO Field into the place to be.

The football, well that's a different conversation, one that still eludes most sports fans in Toronto.

But the first step to changing that is giving people a reason to be there.