WELL, that was more like it.
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Saturday night's Brew and Bite event put the "winter" back into the Bathurst Winter Festival, but it didn't stop another big crowd gathering in the city's centre.
From the music to the food, the lights to the rides, it was a second celebration in seven days of Bathurst's ability to put on a big weekend party - and the Kick Off and Kick On at Keppel campaign showed how the festival effect is spreading.
Winter - with its short days, long nights and tough weather - is a time of contemplation and rumination and as Bathurst takes stock at this halfway point of the year, the city has many reasons to feel satisfied.
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Our winter festival has again been a success, showing no signs that it has reached its capacity or that those who attend - locals and visitors - think it has lost its appeal.
In the next six months, the city will become a motorsport mecca when the Great Race is staged in October and then, just a few months later, a music mecca when rock royalty Sir Elton John plays a sold-out concert to 15,000 at Carrington Park.
This is the same ground, remember, that hosted a shade under 11,000 people for the Melbourne Storm and Penrith Panthers National Rugby League match in March.
This appears to be the new normal for Bathurst.
We long ago grew used to the sporting eyes of Australia focusing on us for the Great Race weekend, but now we don't bat an eyelid when an NRL coach is holding a press conference in our city or a ferris wheel is spinning outside the Council Chambers.
Johnathan Thurston or Cameron Smith running around our football ground? That's normal as well.
We host crowds of thousands and we do it regularly now - in the NRL season, in winter, in January (when Sir Elton comes to town).
And you don't have to be in the city's hospitality industries to get the benefit.
We all get the spin-offs: through the economic injection to the city as jobs are created, through the jolt for the CBD at a time when bricks and mortar regional businesses are under pressure from digital retailing and from the positive publicity these big events give the city we call home.
Simply put, a success for Bathurst is a success for us all.
And in the middle of a Central Tablelands winter, as the days struggle to get into double figures, that's a thought to warm any local heart.