HEBRON – People afflicted with sweet tooth and a bad case of winter blahs suffered no more as they lined country roads for a taste of sugary heaven during Maine Maple Sunday.

Thousands of people across the state found themselves surrounded by the intoxicatingly sweet mixture of maple syrup, wood fires, pancakes and sausage.

“Everyone can relate to it. It’s a very wholesome process that’s very unique to the northern climate,” said Jean Bergeron, owner of Cabane a Sucre Bergeron in Hebron, one of dozens of sugarhouses open to people Sunday. “For me, I have a French-Canadian heritage and this is a significant part of my heritage.”

Bergeron enlisted the help of family, friends, neighbors and hunting buddies to help produce 70 gallons of the precious amber liquid gold this year. In fact, with a half-serious grin, he jokes that “anybody who wants to carry a bucket can join the team.”

Bergeron and his crew operate a 2- by 8-foot, wood-fired evaporator that uses a half cord of wood to produce 10 gallons of maple syrup. In the early days, back when his adult children were kids, he and his wife, Sharon, started making syrup as a way to show the kids what Mother Nature could provide.

“We made maple syrup when I was a kid,” said Jerick Clukey of Bowdoin, who brought three generations of family to Bergeron’s sugar shack. And while his nephew, 6-year-old Jonathon Osmond, liked watching the process going on inside the sugarshack, his niece was content to hang outside and enjoy the delicious homemade treat that comes from pouring maple syrup over ice.

“You take a stick in it and get stuff on it and then you eat it,” Hannah Osmond, 9, of Lisbon Falls, said as she dug her stick in for a third time.

Maine Maple Sunday is always the fourth Sunday in March. Maine’s maple producers open their sugarhouses for people to join them in making maple syrup.

Most sugarhouses offer free tasting and a live demonstration of how syrup is produced, from tap to table. Many offer treats and activities, including syrup on pancakes or ice cream, sugarbush tours, sleigh or wagon rides, and more.

For Bill and Lucille Saucier of Auburn, watching the process was icing on the morning. Their real treat was the pancake breakfast at the West Minot Sugarhouse on Route 119. Hungry people lined up out the door, down the road and around the corner for the chance to slather the homemade pancakes, bacon and sausage breakfast in syrup fresh from the sugarhouse’s 3- by 10-foot oil-fired evaporator.

“We come out for the nice maple breakfast,” said Bill Saucier. “I’m sure it’s going to be enjoyable. It’s going to be well worth the wait.”

The couple have visited eight different operations over the years. They were among the throng of people who waited in line as long as an hour Sunday morning to eat in the small dining area of the West Minot Sugarhouse. They agreed that the tradition is a sure sign that spring has arrived in Maine.

“It’s a neat thing because people are tired of winter and this is the beginning of spring,” said Wayne Slattery, who operates the West Minot Sugarhouse with his wife, Joni, as well as other family and friends. “That’s really what brings people out, cabin fever.”