He thought the hard part was over. Get Maine's "We Support Our Troops" license plate up and running, Rep. Don Pilon, D-Saco, figured, and Maine motorists would take it from there.

Or not.

"Before I got the letter, I had no idea," Pilon said this week.

He was talking about the alert sent out late last week by Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap that the "We Support Our Troops" plate is on borrowed time.

Unless 435 people step up and buy the plates in the next month, bringing the total number in circulation to 4,000, Dunlap will have no choice but to make it the first specialty plate to be yanked since the state started offering them in 1994.

"I have to administer the law as written," Dunlap said Tuesday. "And that means sometimes I have to do stuff that isn't really a lot of fun."

Actually, Dunlap is bending over backward to give the troops plate a chance. The 2007 statute authorizing it required that a minimum of 4,000 plates be sold by last Nov. 1 – one year after they became available. But it wasn't until recently that Dunlap's staff told him the threshold had not yet been met.

That left Dunlap with two choices.

Should he stick to the letter of the law, discontinue the plate immediately and forever be remembered, rightly or wrongly, as the secretary of state who didn't give a hoot about the Maine men and women risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Or should he give those who worked so hard to create the plate a little more time to save it?

"This was a fire I started," Dunlap said. "But it was going to be a fire regardless."

Back when Pilon launched the idea in 2005 – and then surprised skeptics by raising $58,000 to make it a reality – it seemed like a no-brainer: For every plate that was sold and/or renewed, $10 would go to support the families of Maine troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To date, the plates have raised close to $50,000 to help those families pay car-repair bills, fill the oil tank, deal with medical emergencies or cope with any of the other challenges that arise while a loved one – and more often than not the family's primary breadwinner – is serving overseas.

"One hundred percent of it, which is a good thing, goes to help military members and their families in times of emergencies during the deployment cycle," said Master Sgt. Barbara Claudel, director of the Maine National Guard's State Family Program.

All of which raises a perplexing question: Why, in a state with one of the highest numbers of veterans per capita, haven't more Mainers worn their support for the troops on their bumpers?

One problem, say Pilon and Claudel, is that no money has gone into marketing the plates.

"We didn't make the big fancy posters to put in each town office," Claudel said. "It's basically been word of mouth. I've heard lots of people say, 'Geez, I didn't even know they had those plates.'"

Agreed Pilon, "I don't think the National Guard did an awful lot to promote the plate."

Marketing aside, some might argue that Maine simply has reached its saturation point with specialty plates.

According to the Secretary of State's Office, 13 percent of Maine's estimated 1 million passenger vehicles sport specialty plates rather than general-issue "chickadee plates."

Of those, the 15-year-old conservation "loon" plate leads the pack at 57,723, followed by the lobster plate (25,511), the agriculture plate (13,250), the sportsman plate (10,145), the black bear plate (9,835), the breast cancer plate (8,704), the UMaine plate (6,743) and, alas, the "We Support Our Troops" plate (3,565).

A new "animal welfare" plate will come out on Thursday.

But if you think Maine's 10-plate menu is on the heavy side, consider Virginia's ever-expanding menu of 269 specialty plates. In addition to their...