There's a game I like to play around this time of year, as late autumn makes its weary way toward winter, which, it's worth pointing out, won't start for a little more than a week.

I don't have a name for this game, so I'll make one up now. Let's call it "don't turn on the heat."

The rules are pretty simple: Every year I try to go as long as I can without turning up the thermostat. Most of the time, I try to behave as though the thermostat isn't even there, a pretty neat trick because I have a thermostat in just about every room of my home (Yes, that means I have electric heat and you don't have to, I've already said "ouch!" Many times.).

Usually, the game is under way, or, as we are inclined to put it these days, the game is "on" in October. I try to make it to the end of the month without touching the thermostat. This is my version of the autumn classic, which for most people is baseball. My average has been hit or miss over the last decade or so. Sometimes I make it, sometimes I don't. In recent years it's been a breeze.

This year has been particularly a banner year for "don't turn on the heat." October was a pushover, and I made it all the way to the end of November. This is good timing, because over the years, thanks to the increasing costs of energy, the game has taken on a much more serious nature, testing not just my perverse sense of Spartan glory but my pocketbook as well.

Because of this little game of mine, I've gathered an unscientific assessment that can be summed up as follows: It's getting warmer.

I'll admit this does not come across as a striking conclusion. When pieces of the Arctic Circle are breaking off and sent floating around it's no wonder heat does not require a turn-on. It's already on.

A couple of years ago this perception sent me poking into history, where I discovered that years ago, as Christmas approached, people were gearing up for a diversion much more entertaining than "don't turn on the heat." It was called ice skating.

For decades, up through the 1980s or thereabout, ice skating at Hubbard Park's Mirror Lake was all the rage. At mid-century, it was not unusual to find 100 people skating on the lake at any given time. It was the venue for families and friends, and for "skate and date."

"They would skate to the music," is how I put it two years ago. "A concession stand offered hot chocolate and there'd be a fire for keeping warm. In the evening, floodlights would illuminate one side and leave the other in dark shadows, where the older kids would gather and watch the moon rise through the branches over the lake."

A cold winter was taken for granted when Hubbard Park opened at the end of the 19th century. Before electric refrigeration, ice was harvested from Mirror Lake for ice boxes.

Memory and perception can be tricky, particularly when it comes to New England weather. In the last decade, Hubbard Park has been open for skating on very few occasions. But weather behaves in cycles, the experts say, and it's too soon to determine whether what seems to me a dramatic change is anything more than the circling of a cycle.

I made it to the end of October last year, when the first snowfall came on Dec. 19 and stuck around long enough for a white Christmas and the onset of a very chilly winter.

The average temperature of January was more than 4 degrees lower than the average of Januaries dating back to 1904.

Who knows whether that broke the cycle. Slushy as it was, snow came even earlier this time around. We'll see about this January.

By that time, of course, the outcome of "don't turn on the heat" will be a distant memory.