PORTLAND — Mackie Libsack can see the stars when she walks to work from the Eastern Promenade to Double Great Coffee at the top of Munjoy Hill.

She gets there at 6 a.m., a half an hour before the shop opens, to pull out milk, syrups and iced coffee from the refrigerator, take down chairs and set up patio furniture.

“We used to have a line of people waiting at 6:30,” she said last week. But as the sunrise has gotten later — 7:05 a.m. that day — so has the start of the morning rush. That may change Sunday, when daylight saving time ends and the clocks turn back an hour.

While it’s hard to argue with getting extra sleep, it also marks the start of when 9-5ers will leave their desks after dark. On the other end of the day, however, early risers benefit from more sunlight heading into the short days of winter.

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The change won’t make much difference for Ben Lesavoy, the transportation director for Portland schools, who gets to work at 5 a.m., still nearly an hour before twilight next week. He listens to voicemails to see who’s called out, then sets the schedule for the day, laid out in spreadsheets that glow from the screens on his desk as the windows in his office look out into the black morning.

It’s his quiet time before the drivers start trickling into the bus yard off Allen Avenue. They don’t like when the clocks change in the spring because other people on the road early in the morning are tired from losing an hour of sleep and are more accident-prone, he said. But starting next week, it will be lighter out when they come to inspect their buses before hitting the road. The first students get picked up around 7 a.m.

“We don’t like kids having to walk around in the dark,” Lesavoy said.

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Some of those coming in from Casco Bay islands, however, don’t have a choice.

The ferry that students take leaves Portland Harbor at 5 a.m., making stops at Chebeague, Cliff, Long, and Little and Great Diamond islands before arriving back at the Casco Bay Lines terminal on Commercial Street at 7:15 a.m.

Chuck Fagone will have been there the whole time. A fire inspector for the city during the daylight hours, he works security a couple mornings a week at the terminal. Though the time change in the spring is more bothersome, he doesn’t like the idea of the clocks changing in general — a perennial debate that remains stalled at the federal level between competing health and economic arguments for permanently moving to standard or daylight saving time.

“Get rid of it,” he said. “It creates havoc.”

His job at the ferry terminal is mostly to monitor the homeless people who come in to use the bathroom or sit on the benches inside. He’s had to administer Narcan twice. No one else was in the building when Sarah Stauffer made the final boarding call for the 5:45 a.m. ferry to Peaks Island.

Before the next announcement, she went to work in the freight shed, helping unload a food delivery for Hannigan’s Island Market on Peaks and get an order of shingles that had been returned from Cliff Island onto an Eldredge Lumber truck.

“I think the peace that comes with working in darkness is nice,” she said while sorting totes of mail and packages from the U.S. Postal Service into carts going to different islands. The contrasting scents of something rotting on the harbor side and cinnamon buns from Standard Baking across the street cut through the cool air as the deep blue sky started turning orange at the bottom.

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Across town at Tony’s Donut Shop, special education teacher Millie Axelsen got a box of a dozen doughnuts for her team at Waterboro Elementary School, an apple fritter for herself and a chocolate glazed for her son at home in Westbrook. She had to get to the Bolton Street bakery, which opens at 5 a.m., well before sunrise., so she could to drop it off to him before rushing to work.

Chuck Allen, however, didn’t have to hurry. He’d gotten up at 2 a.m., like he always does, before heading in the dark to Tony’s, wearing an orange safety jacket and a black veteran cap. He ordered four raspberry cremes for him and his co-workers at Shaw’s just down Congress Street.

“I’ve been in the dark my whole life,” he said with a smile.

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On the grass by the parking lot for the Back Cove Trail, Sonia Barrantes and Whitney Hogan chatted in a circle of friends after finishing their walk around the 3.5-mile loop, with hats on their heads and weighted vests on their backs. They get there at 6 a.m. every Friday.

“We like being here as the sun’s coming up,” said Barrantes, who exercises other days in a class at Payson Park that starts before sunrise, too. “There’s a whole underground subculture.”

Hogan said she’d rather not have the clocks change, but there is something magical about getting back home to her kids still asleep in the dark, as if nothing had happened at all.

Barrantes likes the sense of accomplishment before the day even gets going.

“You feel like you’ve done something,” she said.

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Just after 7 a.m., people sat in cars parked along the circular drive at Fort Allen Park on the Eastern Prom as the sky, now a lighter blue, started to glow pink above Fort Gorges and the islands beyond it.

Holly Wilkes of Fort Worth, Texas, had her phone set up on a pole by the wall around the USS Portland Memorial. She was in town for her job in wine sales, but she’s also a content creator with social media accounts about gardening, where she sometimes posts sunrises from places she travels. ChatGPT had led her here.

“It’s a great, slow way to start your day,” she said, as more and more of the blinding yellow orb showed itself.

It was the easternmost sunrise she’d ever seen, and compared to where she lives, when the sun comes up close to 8 a.m. this time of year, it was early.