In 1938, Jesse Mattos accidentally dropped his high school class ring into the toilet at the butcher shop where he worked in his hometown near Mount Shasta, Calif. In one of those what-are-the-odds? stories, Mattos and his keepsake have been reunited after 73 years, the Vallejo Times-Herald tells us.

The $29 ring was found in March in a bucket of debris cleaned from the sewer system in Dunsmuir, about 200 miles north of Vallejo, where Mattos settled.

"Right at the very top of the bucket, I spotted the inside part of the ring," sanitation worker Tony Congi (Class of '76) told the paper. Like Mattos, he worked in the same butcher shop as a teen.

Congi got the ring cleaned at a jewelers, checked the 1938 yearbook at his alma mater and determined that only one graduating senior had the initials "J.T.M." — Jesse Taylor Mattos.

In another stroke of luck, Congi knew a classmate of Mattos', who just happened to have his phone number.

Congi called Mattos and arranged to return the ring.

"It was neater than heck," Congi said of their Easter visit.

Mattos, now 90, said that after that unfortunate slip when he was 18 years old, "I never thought anything about it."

The ring provided a much-needed lift for Mattos, who broke his right wrist and arm earlier this year and whose wife died just days before Congi contacted him.

"Something like this ring thing was a real booster for me," Mattos said. "I felt like I was a lot younger again."

Read the whole saga here and see Mattos flashing his vintage bling.