This time five years ago, Portland was gearing up for a new winter festival modeled after Quebec City’s famed Carnaval featuring parties, ice sculptures and outdoor sports, and the organizer was bullish on its prospects.

“I think we can get to the point where this is a highly coveted, planned event for people across the world,” Shamrock Sports and Entertainment CEO Brian Corcoran told the Press Herald in advance of the inaugural festival, held for three days at the end of January 2020 on Portland’s Eastern Promenade.

After three iterations of Carnaval Maine — or Carnaval ME? It was never clear what we were supposed to call it — the latest of which drew about half the anticipated attendance, that’s not the direction it’s headed, to say the least. Last month, Corcoran admitted that a long-teased fourth event wasn’t happening this winter, though he said he hasn’t given up on the concept as a whole.

But is there a place for a winter carnival in Portland? If Carnaval Maine’s attempts at tinkering with the timing, location, duration and focus didn’t work, what would?

The answer could lie in the not-too-distant past.

Just months before Shamrock announced its plans for the festival, saying its purpose was “100%” to stimulate tourism in winter, Portland Downtown brought an end to the popular Old Port Festival’s 46-year run, saying the single-day summer kickoff event had “achieved its mission” of attracting people to the now-thriving business district (to the tune of 30,000 attendees some years).

Are these not the same businesses that Carnaval was meant to boost? Could the answer be as simple as moving the Old Port Fest to winter?

The first order of business would be to ditch the name and any comparisons to the 10-day Canadian celebration, which dates back to the 19th century and draws hundreds of thousands of people, setting the bar impossibly high. There’s also the matter of the signature feature of any winter festival — reliably cold weather and snow on the ground — which Carnaval Maine organizers learned the hard way is no longer a given in Portland.

And before dreaming of attracting attendees from out of town, it would need buy-in from local residents, returning year after year to bring a base level of energy. For that to happen, it would probably need to be free for people to come scope out the scene, allowing them to open their wallets at will once they got there.

The latest Carnaval, which drew 10,800 people over five days in March 2023, seemed to be inching toward a version of the Old Port Fest in location and accessibility, having moved from the Prom to the parking lot of DiMillo’s on Commercial Street and waiving admission for kids 10 and under (though all other general admission tickets went up from $20 to $25). But a cold slab of concrete proved to be little improvement over the Prom’s bare, weather-worn grounds.

If the festival was moved up into the heart of the Old Port, however, I don’t think the absence of snow would be as stark. Participating businesses could get in the spirit by decorating their storefronts, and like during the Old Port Fest and the pandemic, the city could shut down streets to cars and ease restrictions so that restaurants and vendors could take over the sidewalks.

Rides, games and warming huts could be set up in Lincoln Park, a more contained space than the two Carnaval locations, allowing fewer people to create a more festive atmosphere that also would catch the attention of anyone coming down Congress Street.

How would this make any money for Shamrock? It probably wouldn’t at first, but there could be sponsors, of course, and ticket-holders could get bracelets that would earn them deals at businesses throughout town. There could be higher-priced events, like there were at Carnaval, maybe in the courtyard of Portland Harbor Hotel, which wouldn’t take as much to turn into a tiny winter wonderland. (Whatever happened to its annual ice bar, anyway; wasn’t that a popular event?)

Portland Downtown said cost was not a factor in canceling the Old Port Fest — that, through in-kind donations of labor and materials from the city, it usually at least broke even. Maybe the nonprofit downtown improvement group, funded by property owners, is a more appropriate organizer of the event, if there truly is a need (and a will from the taxpayers).

There might be a million reasons why this wouldn’t work, or that the city or businesses wouldn’t want it. But if Portland has any chance of pulling off a winter festival, there is one aspect of Quebec’s Carnaval that it needs to replicate: bringing out the community’s joie de vivre. The Old Port Fest did that.

It’s worth noting, too, that, for the first 60 years, Quebec’s festival was held only intermittently. It wasn’t until 1955 — the same year it introduced the Bonhomme Carnaval, a 7-foot-tall snowman mascot, to lead its parades — that it became an annual event.

I know some giant puppets that might be up to the task.