Assuming it’s not made up, I dare say they had to be booked for something, otherwise the next evening there’d be a parade of cars being pushed home from their local watering holes

Booting on a schedule as others have suggested would be the simplest by far.

To answer as asked though, it’s not something I’ve needed to do but it sounds like a VPN + IGMP proxy (I’m assuming you have a separate subnet for your VPN) might fit the bill.

Alternatively some kind of low power device (a Pi or something) that lives in the same subnet could make the WOL call locally, and you just need to find a way to trigger it. Could do it via a http call for example.