Dare I mention this?

We could get another snowstorm in the next couple of weeks, after all, in which case I could be justly accused of raising hopes that are so easily dashed. And frigid wind could also sweep down from Canada and cause the thermometer to plunge for a few days, which surely would make a mockery of my words.

But there are some things in life that are too important to pass unannounced, so I’ll just come right out and say it: When we wake up on Sunday it will officially be spring. It says so right on the calendar, if you don’t believe me. So when we drive to work the next day and the days thereafter, we can look squarely at spring through the windshield while another long and seemingly interminable winter fades into the distance behind us, where it belongs.

OK, I know what many of you are thinking. We people in Maine are not supposed to pay too much attention to what the calendar says about the first day of spring, the vernal equinox, when the length of day equals the length of night. We residents of the frozen north are supposed to be too weather-savvy to fall for premature proclamations that would have us believe that winter weather really is over for another year and the warm days finally are here. In Maine, we know that while March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, there’s a chance that April will come in like a lion all over again, bruising our spirits and bending us yet again to our snow shovels.

Yet as the temperatures have consistently climbed into the 40s recently, there’s been ample evidence that we Mainers may already have succumbed to the seasonal affliction that our experience warns us to resist. At the official arrival of spring, all it takes is a glimpse of bare ground and the warm embrace of the sun to give us all a bad case of early spring fever. A forecast of snow that would have made us wince not long ago is now much easier to endure. It won’t last, we tell one another with a shrug, as the dirty snowbanks melt into rivers that enlarge the already cavernous potholes.

A drive through town during spring’s deceptive debut reveals that the season’s harbingers are out in full force. Merchants with brooms send up clouds of gritty dust in front of their shops. Cars full of kids cruise the streets, their radios booming a brain-buzzing hip-hop symphony through opened windows. The motorcycles and bicyclists are out there, too, along with the strollers who walk with a lighter step and smile at one another in passing. Youngsters, who have no patience with seasonal delays of any sort, roam the neighborhoods in shorts and sweat shirts as if to dare Maine’s reluctant spring into full bloom.

At the department stores men stand wistfully in front of the racks of rods and reels, dreaming of the opening of the fishing season, which falls, fittingly, on April Fools’ Day. Even as the ground lay buried under a mountain of old snow, with a covering of fresh white always a possibility in the raw weeks ahead, the seed catalogs arrive in the mail to seduce us with their tantalizing images, their promise of a fertility that’s been locked in ice for months. And while the spring we long for may be here in name only starting Sunday, listening to the Red Sox on the radio – the world champion Red Sox, that is – is enough to make us believe we no longer are merely the huddled masses yearning to be warm.

No, Maine people are not supposed to heed what the calendar says about spring when it’s only March. Maybe we’ll be smarter next year.