Exits matter. The way an actor leaves the stage can affect the way the audience remembers the whole performance.

That should be on the mind of everyone involved in the Occupy Maine drama, both demonstrators and city officials, as they move toward the ending that is scheduled to come on Monday.

The Occupy movement has been a fixture in Portland’s Lincoln Park since October, much longer, we guess, than the group’s organizers had ever anticipated when they first encamped in Monument Square in solidarity with anti-Wall Street protestors in New York. The Occupy Maine protest, which moved to Lincoln Park at the invitation of the city, has outlasted the New York demonstration that inspired it, as well as others in Augusta, Bangor and Boston.

While not universally appreciated, the ragtag encampment made a powerful statement about economic inequality in America, and developed into a supportive community in which voices seldom heard in the political debate were given a chance to be heard. What started as a big picture critique of the whole economic and political systems expanded to include very specific local issues surrounding poverty and homelessness that needed to be part of the civic conversation.

But at the height of the encampment, the group’s message was obscured by growing public health and safety issues that necessarily result from a large, uncontrolled group of people living in a confined space. The city was just as right to move to end the encampment as it was to be patient with it in the first place.

Now that a superior court justice has denied the protestors’ petition to stay, the group has been given until Monday to leave. How it does so will have a big impact in how the organization is viewed in future civic debates.

As Justice Thomas Warren wrote in his opinion, the occupation was speech. But even free speech is not an unlimited right.

The occupiers can be proud of what they have accomplished so far and can leave with their dignity. Or they can force themselves to be dragged out and feed the lawless image their critics paint.

After the tents go down, there will be one lasting image, and the way the occupation comes to an end will have a lot to say about how it will be remembered.