Beating its own estimates of nearly complete recovery from the Christmas Day outage by several hours, Eversource had Newtown/Sandy Hook customers down to just five without power by 2:45 pm, Saturday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, Eversource had continued to predict final recovery could be as late as 11:45 pm, Saturday — a very cold weekend day.

Compared to previous storms, the restoration appeared to go quickly and smoothly. Utility vehicles from companies in Connecticut and the surrounding region populated the town swiftly, in what seemed to be a well-organized response.

Full restoration was expected before nightfall.