PORTLAND – The temperature could top 32 degrees on Monday. If so, it’d be the first time in more than two weeks.

Suffice to say, memories of the warm January when it hit 67 degrees on one freakishly warm day have been replaced by a recent deep freeze. “It seems like a long time ago now,” said Tom Hawley of the National Weather Service.

The last time it topped freezing was back on Jan. 24, when it hit 38 degrees, he said. Since then, it has been a stretch of bitter cold.

Peter Geiger, editor of the Farmers’ Almanac, is happy with the recent cold snap. He predicted a colder-than-normal winter, and instead Maine’s lakes and ponds failed to freeze because it was so warm earlier in the season.

The cold weather allowed him to save face.

“I was banking on cold for the winter, so I’m ecstatic with February,” Geiger said from his office in Lewiston. “It just came later than I wanted.”

For snow lovers, however, the season has been found wanting.

As of Sunday, Maine’s largest city had recorded just 15.7 inches of snow. Even with a snowstorm possible later this week, the city could have the dubious distinction of going down as the least-snowy winter on record, Hawley said. The record for the least amount of snow in Portland was 28.5 inches in 1979-80.

That’s bad news for snow plow operators.

John Beyer of Commercial Landscape Management in South Portland has been in the plowing business for 17 years and has never seen a winter in which snow has been in such short supply.

“We’re coming off a winter last year that was just devastating,” he said, and this winter has been even worse.

Beyer, who does mostly commercial work and has some residential clients, said that with only four more weeks of deep winter remaining, he’s not banking on the chances of a late-season reversal and is thinking ahead to spring landscaping.

But Portland’s public works director, Mike Bobinsky, hasn’t given up on a possible turnabout.

“Things could change, and we could have pretty substantial snow in the March-to-April period,” said Bobinsky, who’s not yet ready to count the savings in the city’s $780,000 snow removal budget.

Most of the costs are fixed, he noted, and the big variables include road salt, overtime and equipment from outside contractors – primarily trucks used to haul the snow away. Any money left over at the end of the season goes back to the city’s general fund and can be made available to other departments in need of help.

The recent cold snap has allowed ski areas to make plenty of snow despite the lack of natural snow, said Greg Sweetser, executive director of Ski Maine.

February and March are the biggest ski months, but they can’t make up for the lack of snow earlier in the season, he said. Some smaller ski areas weren’t able to open for Christmas, and others had to close temporarily because of rain.

“First it was too warm, then it was too cold. We feel like the three bears. The porridge has to be just right. We’re hitting the right spot right now,” he said.