HANOVER — In the 1943 movie, Lassie came home.
In the 1996 Shawn Colvin song, Sunny came home.
In Hanover next week, Josh Tuohy’s most prized piece of sports memorabilia will come home to the Salt hill Pub, almost two years after someone stole the frame containing an autographed Carlton Fisk jersey — Red Sox No. 27.
It turned up almost as mysteriously as it had disappeared from the wall above the bar on or around Aug. 1, 2017.
“A friend of mine brought it to me at the pub in Lebanon last week,” Tuohy said on Friday. “How he found out who had it, I don’t know — just that he went to the person with his suspicions and finally got it back. When he came in with it, it just floored me. It was a busy day at the pub, and I dropped what I was doing, and gave him a big hug.”
Tuohy’s wife Meggin had given him the framed jersey, along with a Fisk baseball card from the late 1970s — “Definitely a Red Sox card, not a White Sox,” Tuohy said of the team Fisk joined in 1981 — for their first wedding anniversary about 10 years before.
Fisk, the Hall of Fame catcher who grew up in Charlestown and played high school ball for Claremont resident Ralph Silva, hit 351 home runs in 24 major-league seasons, most memorably the 12th-inning shot he pulled just inside the left-field foul pole at Fenway Park to win game 6 of the Red Sox’s 1975 World Series against Cincinnati.
“Fisk is my all-time favorite player,” Tuohy said. “I told my wife that whoever took it could not possibly know how valuable it is to me.”
Other than some minor damage to the frame itself, the contents were “totally intact,” Tuohy added. An Upper Valley frame shop is restoring it now, and Tuohy expects to hang it back over the bar of the Hanover pub on Monday.
“That’s its rightful spot,” Tuohy said. “There’s a Guinness sign there right now. I love Guinness, but …”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.