Have you ever lost something and, after a little while, just determined there was no use in looking for it anymore? Then, out of nowhere, it turns up?

That actually happened to me recently. More on that in a bit.

It was a more recent, and similar, event that made me remember this. This summer, a mechanic digging through a Ford Edge in Minnesota came across a wallet from a Ford plant worker in Michigan 11 years after it was lost. It turned out to have all the contents in it, too: some cash, a driver’s license and some gift cards that the owner, Richard Guilford, planned to use for Christmas gifts.

To his surprise, Guilford got it all back.

Well, Mr. Guilford, I’ll see your wallet and raise you a class ring.

I graduated from Wasson High School in Colorado Springs in 1995 and, like many then and now, got a class ring to celebrate. I personalized it as much as possible, putting my full name inside it, putting my August birthstone at the top and putting football and baseball symbols on one side. It showed a little bit about who I was at the time, or at least who I thought I was.

I took it with me when I went to Grand Junction to attend what was then Mesa State College to study journalism. Two years later, after I’d moved out of the dorms and gotten a house with some roommates, we had a few get-together at the house where a lot of people came over.

That’s where this started. I left that class ring on a shelf in the bathroom and, after one of those get-togethers, noticed it was missing.

I looked around the house thinking that, just maybe, it had been knocked on the ground or taken to another part of the house. It wasn’t, so the only option at that point was to track down everyone at the get-together, ask all of them about it and hope that the person who took it is honest with me.

Fat chance. So the proverbial white flag went up, and I resigned myself to knowing the ring was gone forever.

Twenty-four years later in May 2018, I was working as a photographer and page designer at The News-Review in Roseburg, Ore., living with my wife and adopted daughter not far out of town. I was working in the backyard of our house when I got a surprise text message from Josh Carney, who was working as the sports editor of the Glenwood Springs Post Independent — one of my former employers — at the time.

“Hey dude. Hope you’re doing well,” he texted. “Random question: Did you ever lose a class ring?”

“Ummm … yeah,” I responded. “I did lose one when I was in college, but that was years ago. Why do you ask?”

Within the hour, a Facebook message came over: “Hey, I live on the Western Slope…and I think I found your class ring. Would you like me to mail it to you?

“1995 Wasson.”

After taking a minute to process that, I replied: “Do you have a picture of it? Just wondering because I lost it years ago and never thought about it until just now when a buddy of mine asked if I had lost it. And where was this found out of curiosity?”

I gave her the description of the ring.

“Found it in a box of old stuff that belonged to my husband,” she replied. “He has no idea where he got it. I Googled your name, found an old newspaper article with your old work email. I emailed and got a response probably from your friend.”

She sent me photos of the ring.

It was a spot-on match.

“Holy crap. Wow,” I said. “Yes. That is mine.”

It turned out, she said, that her husband had purchased some old storage units at facilities across the Western Slope for the past two decades. “No telling how long this box has been around, stashed in a big shop here,” she said.

She also said they Googled my school name and found a yearbook online. They found two Jons and started Googling names when her husband noticed the inscription inside the ring.

“It was a fun ‘mystery’ for us today,” she said with a smile emoji.

It goes without saying that she didn’t have to do this. It’s an 18-karat-gold ring, so she could have just gone to a local pawn shop, sold it and gotten some money for it. I’m guessing a lot of people would have done that. I even threw an offer at her to send a check her way to compensate her.

She declined.

“That thanks is enough,” she said. “My whole life I tried to be a good human, as I was raised. There are nice people still out there in a crazy world.”

Things have certainly changed since I was in high school. Wasson hasn’t been a traditional high school since 2013. The college I graduated from has been renamed Colorado Mesa University. Even this paper switched from being the Gazette-Telegraph to The Gazette in the late 1990s.

But there still people who care about doing the right thing, just like that honest mechanic in Minnesota or that good human on the Western Slope who I’ll forever be grateful to.