LEWISTON – Dan Boucher hopes his wife didn’t catch wind of the news sweeping Maine Wednesday – that the NFL had decided to broadcast Saturday night’s game between the New England Patriots and New York Giants on free TV after all.

“I’m still going to tell my wife this is only on the NFL Network, and I’m going to have to come out to watch the game,” he said.

Boucher said he’s going to stick with his plans to watch the game at Fast Breaks Restaurant on Lisbon Street, even though he and many other football fans can now watch the game at their homes on CBS or NBC, in addition to the NFL Network, which is available in fewer than 40 percent of the nation’s homes.

The league’s decision affected the Saturday evening plans of countless fans, businesses and workers.

“I think it’s definitely going to affect us,” Fast Breaks bartender Kimberly Bantos said. “Personally, I think if you live in Maine, you should be able to watch the game. But as a bartender that’s working that night, there’s no doubt that it’s going to impact us.”

“We’ll still have a great crowd here,” she added. “There are a lot of people that like to go out to a bar and watch a Patriots game, but (having the game shown just on the NFL Network) would have driven people out to see the games, just like when we have boxing or something that you can’t get except on pay-per-view.”

Another bar patron and football fan who asked only to be identified as “Herb” said the bars and restaurants will still be crowded Saturday night.

“You’ll probably get about 20 percent who chose to go out to a bar that night who won’t go out now,” he said. “There are people that are going to go out to a bar anyway. It’s not just that you’re at a bar, but the people you’re hanging around with.”

Many bars and restaurants such as Fast Breaks scheduled extra staff to handle the expected crush of fans hoping to witness history Saturday night as the Patriots attempt to become the first team to finish the regular season 16-0. Some spent advertising money or had special promotions planned to draw those fans left in the dark by the NFL Network’s exclusivity.

“As a business owner, I was a little bit disappointed. As a fan, I think everyone should get to see it,” said Gridiron Restaurant and Sports Pub owner Schan Martin. “We already do well on Saturday nights anyways. And we have (radio station) WBLM out here, so we generally do pretty well for the games.”

Not all businesses will be losing customers with the addition of CBS and NBC. Flagship Cinemas in Auburn, which has been showing all of the Patriots game this season on one of its big screens to near-capacity crowds, was not going to be able to show the game because it subscribed to Time Warner, which is locked in a dispute with the NFL over what tier the NFL Network should be placed on for cable subscribers.

Auburn Flagship manager Prudi McLean said the theater went so far as to contact the NFL in hopes of getting the game on the big screen, but had no luck.

“That is amazing,” McLean said of the league’s about-face. “We certainly will work on (showing Saturday night’s game). I’ll have to talk to my boss and see what we’re going to do.”

McLean said fans had been calling Flagship all week to ask if the theater was showing the game. She was certain it would have sold out the roughly 200 seats and had to turn people away if it had access to the game that most of Lewiston-Auburn did not.

Now fans throughout the country will get to see the Patriots try to stay perfect and Tom Brady try to break Peyton Manning’s record for touchdown passes in a season, and it seems everyone agrees that is a good thing, even if they may stand to lose a buck.

This will be the first three-network simulcast in NFL history and the first simulcast of an NFL game since the inaugural Super Bowl in 1967, when CBS and NBC televised the meeting of the champions of the newly merged National Football League and American Football League.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.