OTTAWA - On the final weekend of Bluesfest, one of the world’s most popular rock bands played 25 km away.

Wonder if Green Day would have attracted a larger audience to Scotiabank Place on another night?

The 8,000 who were there didn’t care. They had their heroes all to themselves.

And lucky for them, Green Day made it Audience Participation Night.

“This ain’t TV,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong shouted at them. “Get off your f---ing asses.”

(Well, you certainly can’t say that on TV.)

He invited a local kid named Ben to get off his ass and onto the stage.

He had asked the crowd if anyone wanted to be saved, and young Ben was the chosen one.

Any Christians in the audience — to be fair, no one ’fessed up when Armstrong asked — likely cringed when, after singing East Jesus Nowhere, he placed his hand on Ben’s head like a preacher.

Right on cue, Ben fell to the floor as flames shot up with a huge bang.

The crowd loved it, and Ben presumably morphed into Rod and Todd Flanders from The Simpsons.

Armstrong and his longtime bandmates Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool engaged the crowd from the moment they ran onto the stage and blasted into the title track from their latest album, 21st Century Breakdown.

Armstrong spent much of the concert within groping distance of his admirers, frantically jumping around a narrow ramp that extended from the stage about 30 feet into the crowd.

During songs such as Know Your Enemy and Boulevard of Broken Dreams, he would pause to let the audience sing key lyrics, sometimes full choruses, which they knew by heart.

He knew they would. Green Day’s fans are Idiots, but not Dead Heads.

But that was nothing. He later invited a couple of them up on stage to sing. One young man ended his karoake dream by running down the ramp and diving into the outstretched arms of the crowd. Fun!

Armstrong let another guy up on stage and to play guitar for Jesus of Suburbia.

Wait, it gets better. At still another point, he pulled a young woman up on stage, armed her with a Super Soaker and told her to fire away at the crowd. Does the fun never end?

Green Day was in the middle of three concerts in as many nights — they played Hamilton Thursday and play Montreal tonight — but remained downright hyper every second of the two-hour set.

The energy infected about a dozen rowdies moshing near the front of the stage.

Perhaps because they were promoting their new album, they left out a few of their biggest hits, including When I Come Around and Wake Me Up When September Ends.

Did anyone notice? They closed with Time of Your Life, and for many, especially those who joined the band onstage, it probably was.

And the band played past 11 p.m., which you can’t do at Bluesfest.