There’s a small but tireless band of advocates who dream of a day when there is no such thing as daylight saving time in Colorado — only “time.”

Members of this group are split as to whether it’d be best to stick with the timeline we’re in now — that is, earlier sunrises with darker evenings — or the timeline we’ll shift to in March, when sunsets will suddenly take place an hour later. Their priority is simply to lock the state’s clocks, one way or another, with no “fall back” or “spring forward.”

This movement has suffered repeated defeats in recent years. In fact, it’s become something of an annual tradition for Colorado state lawmakers to consider and then kill a lock-the-clocks bill. This ritual played out again on Wednesday, with state Sen. Ray Scott, R-Grand Junction, introducing a bill that died at the committee level in a 3-2 vote.

“I feel like I’m a member of a long club of (lawmakers) who’ve attempted to do anything — anything! — about locking the clock,” Scott said at the committee hearing. “When you first look at it, you go, ‘Maybe this is the year,’ and then you find out pretty quickly it’s not the year.”

But there is real reason to believe that one of these years might actually be the year.

State legislatures around the country are increasingly willing to consider changes, as evidenced by a vote taken just this week in Wyoming to potentially shift that state permanently to one time.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, also introduced legislation last year to lock the clock nationwide. Slowly, he’s picking up support from his colleagues, including several Democrats who’ve signed on as co-sponsors.

“Patty Murray (D-Washington), Dianne Feinstein (D-California),” said an enthusiastic Scott Yates, a Denverite and lock-the-clock advocate who has traveled the country to speak out against daylight saving time. “I just talked to the legislative director for Marco Rubio last week in D.C. It’s at the top of their agenda; they’re serious about this. They are convinced this is the kind of bipartisan bill that is a good idea to pass in the post-impeachment world.”

Yates acknowledged that any change at the federal level could be years off, if it ever happens, but he insisted that he’s observed real progress for his movement.

Neither of Colorado’s U.S. senators have gotten involved yet. Former state Sen. Greg Brophy, who carried lock-the-clock bills for years at the Colorado Capitol, said he speaks to Colorado’s junior senator, Cory Gardner, once a week, and that this clock debate “isn’t his thing.”

Brophy said he’s encouraged, though, by the slowly changing tide he has observed in Washington.

“We’re getting close,” said Brophy, before dialing that back: “‘We’re getting closer’ is probably better.

“For a guy who started on this 10 years ago, we’re a hell of a lot closer now than we were then.”

Contrary to popular belief, the lock-the-clock efforts are not strongly opposed by agricultural interests in Colorado. One state senator, Republican Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling, a rancher by profession, said it makes little difference to farmers when the sun comes up. They’ll start working at dawn in any event.

Rather, the biggest reason the movement has made so few advances at the state level in Colorado is the ski industry, which strongly opposes any effort to mess with the state’s clocks and thereby alter the outdoor recreation schedule.

“We like the extra hour in the morning in the winter and the extra hour in the evening in the summer. It works well for us,” said Chris Linsmayer, public affairs director for Colorado Ski Country USA, the industry group representing 23 ski areas.

Many lawmakers privately say they’d love to abolish daylight saving time. Few seem willing to take on the ski industry.

One of them, Greenwood Village’s Jeff Bridges, has come up with a compromise: He plans to introduce a memorial — unlike a law, it’d be nonbinding, and so more likely to garner wider support — in the state Senate this year to urge Colorado’s congressional delegation to support lock-the-clock legislation federally. He said he wants to see a change but is concerned about any state-level action that could potentially put Colorado out of sync with any federal shift.

“I would prefer a national solution where we, on a national level, stop springing forward and falling back,” said Sen. Bridges, a Democrat who said he hates when the clock changes, especially when he loses sleep because of it. “I want consistency. I’d prefer it across the country, across the year.”

Bridges said Sens. Scott and Leroy Garcia — the Senate president — will join his memorial as sponsors.

Bridges plans to run that memorial on the first Monday after the clock springs forward.

“Assuming I can get up and make it into work on time,” he said.