GREEN BAY, Wis. — Corey Behnke was a 7-year-old attending a Green Bay Packers preseason game with his grandfather when he pointed to the homes across the street from Lambeau Field and vowed to live there eventually.

Now he has one of the best spots to watch as the NFL’s greatest offseason spectacle takes shape.

The NFL draft’s annual pilgrimage to cities across the league is arriving in Green Bay next week with all the pageantry that comes from operating in the home of the NFL’s only publicly owned franchise.

“I think it’s going to be iconic in a way that other drafts aren’t,” said Behnke, now president of the neighborhood association of the area adjacent to Lambeau Field.

As soon as the NFL started taking its draft around the country nearly a decade ago, Packers officials wondered what it would take to bring the event to Green Bay. They realized they’d never get a Super Bowl because of Green Bay’s small population and frigid February weather.

Hosting a draft would be the next best thing.

The possibility that Packers president/CEO Mark Murphy envisioned so long ago now becomes reality just as he prepares for his retirement this summer.

The smaller population likely means a smaller number of people at this draft. Murphy said a total attendance of about 250,000 is expected, less than one-third of the record crowd of over 775,000 that attended last year’s draft in Detroit. Crowd figures are measured by adding the attendance numbers for each of the draft’s three days, so one person who attends all three days would be counted three times.