Boston hit 96 degrees by 2 p.m. Tuesday, breaking a 76-year record for the city’s hottest spring day and tying for the second-hottest spring day ever recorded in the metro area. By 3:30 p.m., temperatures had eased to around 91 degrees, but the damage to the record book was already done.

The heat did not stop at the city line. Dozens of New England towns and cities away from the South Coast set new daily highs Tuesday, including Reading, Lowell, Milton, Newton, Framingham, Natick, Walpole, Springfield, Westfield, Greenfield, Northampton and Pittsfield. Providence, Portland, Maine, Manchester and Keene, New Hampshire, and Bennington, Vermont also set records as the warmth spread across the region.

The number that mattered most in Boston was 96, which pushed past the city’s previous spring mark of 90 degrees and ended a record that had stood for 76 years. Record-keeping in Greater Boston dates back to the late 1800s, giving Tuesday’s reading a place in a long weather history that rarely sees spring heat this severe.

Hartford and Springfield also recorded their first heat wave of the season Tuesday afternoon, each logging three consecutive 90-degree or warmer days. That is a sharper signal of the same pattern that drove Boston’s surge: widespread heat across inland New England, while only areas near the immediate coast by the Cape and along southern Rhode Island and Massachusetts stayed below 90 because southerly flow pushed cooler ocean air inland.

The timing matters because the heat is not finished. Greater Boston is likely to reach 90 degrees again Wednesday, with temperatures expected to climb back into the upper 80s and low 90s. That would put the region back in range to challenge the existing May 20 daily high record of 91 degrees, set in 1996, and could add another layer to a week already defined by rare early-season heat.

For Boston, Tuesday was not just a warm afternoon. It was the day a spring record fell, and the city joined a broad swath of New England in a weather pattern hot enough to rewrite daily highs from Maine to western Massachusetts.