My friend Kathy told me recently that she was breaking up with winter. She said the season was like a bad boyfriend — one minute all deep and pure, the next minute completely ghosting like some dude you met at No Name over the holiday break.

But we may have given up too soon.

Winter is back, baby. Like it never paid one snowflake of attention to our ongoing bitch session behind its back. Over a foot of pow overnight. Blizzard winds that gusted so hard they shut down lifts for hours. And still more white stuff in the forecast for the weekend.

Even weather forecaster Evan Thayer was practically writing love letters with another foot or two on the way.

And just like that, we were back too. All in. Waxing our skis. Checking the radar. Refreshing the Epic app more than our Hinge feed.

Winter, for some of us, is a snowmance. But if you’re looking for what makes that snowmance actually work, don’t look at the lift lines or the skiers in Goretex and heated gloves.

Go stand at the bus stop at 7 o’clock in the morning.

That’s when it hit me. Almost literally. I spotted a small sidewalk snowplow heading straight toward where I was standing. I leapt aside and gave the driver a dramatic “after you” sweep of my arm. As the plow passed, the driver grinned back at me through the cab window, like we were in on the same joke. After I got on the bus, we passed the plow. It was still snowing. And the little plow was still moving up the sidewalk.

I got off the bus at Old Town Transit Center to catch the purple bus to Empire. My friends and I were meeting early in hopes of scoring first chair when the lift opened at 8. As I waited for them, “Hello My Old Heart” by the Oh Hellos came into my AirPods.

Hello my old heart / How have you been?

Flakes drifted down in the morning light. The snow-covered trails of Park City Mountain slowly emerged in the dawn.

Hello my old heart.

There were plenty of people waiting for the purple bus. But I was the only skier.

Instead of ski boots and Patagonia puffers, I saw work boots and day-glo orange vests. Thermoses and lunch coolers. Tired faces glowing softly in the light of an iPhone. They weren’t headed out to ski. They were headed to work.

And suddenly, the song felt less like a soundtrack and more like a conversation with the part of me that forgets every single year that they are the real heartbeat of Park City.

While the rest of us strategize which lift will deliver the most freshies, they quietly show up. They clear the sidewalks. They drive the buses. They tune the skis and prep the kitchens and make the coffee. They push the snow into tidy banks so the rest of us can complain about it safely.

Winter may be romance for some. For others, it’s camaraderie at a bus stop rather than on a chairlift. It’s hoping for a seat so you can close your eyes for a few minutes before a long shift.

Park City in winter is people plus snow. Take away the snow, and we’re just a town. Take away the people, and it’s just weather. But together, they’re the real heartbeat.

My friends arrived just before the purple bus pulled in and we climbed aboard. We were the only skiers among a crowd headed to work. We stuck out like a rock in a snowdrift — a bunch of loud-talkers, over-caffeinated and overexcited for the joy of snow — not the labor of it. The bus dropped us off and we trudged toward the lift and what were sure to be epic turns.

A lifty was shoveling the ramp as we lined up in front of the pass scanners. A few minutes later, he carried out a large clock. We snapped a pic, giddy about our first chair timing. It was 7:53 a.m.

“You guys know the lift doesn’t open till 9, right?” he remarked as he passed in front of us.

Wait, what?

“Yesterday was the last day it opened at 8,” he said securing the clock to a board. “Want me to reset it for you?” he joked.

We had been so eager, so sure of our schedule. But winter has its own clock.

The workers at the transit center had been up for hours, had probably driven through Parley’s to get there. The sidewalks were cleared. The buses were running. The mountain was being readied. We were early, but we were running on yesterday’s time.

We laughed and went into the lodge to wait.

Winter may flirt and ghost and roar back without any warning at all. It keeps its own pace. But the heartbeat of this town — the steady rhythm of people plus snow — never misses a beat.

Welcome back, winter.