Around 2011, I wheeled a used mountain bike I’d bought off my friend Jesse Fortier into a Bend bike shop to see about getting a tune-up. With just a glance at the mid-’90s Cannondale, the bike mechanic shifted gears into sales mode, telling me why I should buy a new bike in the predictable yet always off-putting way peculiar to certain sporty industries.

Vindication — mine — was a moment away: He rolled my bike over and onto his workstation. Less than a minute later, he turned to me and, finally seeing me, asked “Where’d you say you got this?”

I had bought it from Fortier, but the bike’s most adoring owner had been Jacob Chapman, who gave it to Fortier, his former brother-in-law, around 2003.

Last month, Chapman bought it back from me, drawing the cycle to a close.

Though Fortier is our mutual friend, Chapman and I only met Jan. 23, after he pulled into my driveway. Fortier had put us in touch, and I was waiting in the garage and could see him grinning through the windshield of his car — not necessarily at me, but at the Cannondale I was holding.

I was still its owner at that point, but that was a technicality. These two were meant to be together.

About 30 years ago, a Bend bike shop had sold the Killer V 900 bike to Chapman’s older sister, whose frame was just too small for the bike. But it was just the right size for her brother, and the following year, he borrowed the money from his mom to buy it from his sister.

He was in 7th grade at the time and helped out on an area farm doing tasks like mowing, moving irrigation pipes and shoveling out the chicken coop for $5 an hour. The 2000 Mountain View High School graduate estimates it took him through high school to pay back his mom.

Chapman also used the money, which he thought “was a lot at the time,” to buy better, lighter bike parts. The suspension fork of the bike cost about $300, he believes.

”I upgraded it here and there,” he said. “I was always working and buying new parts. All these little tiny parts, like these blue bolts, that red bolt, I totally remember. … One summer I saved up and I bought these brakes.” No wonder bike shop guy did a doubletake upon closer inspection.

Farm labor was followed by jobs at McGrath’s Fish House and Pilot Butte Drive-In. Eventually, he took a job at Sunnyside Sports, where he worked for about 21 years, and bought a new bike. A couple of years later, around 2003, he gave the Cannondale to Fortier.

Stepping into my garage to see his bike again must have been like stepping back in time for Chapman, who has a litany of stories from his early years with the bike. He spoke of urban mountain biking with his friends and how they were blissfully unaware of the many bike trails around their hometown. Right after high school, they made a pilgrimage to Moab, Utah, where he rode the bike. He even bears a V-shaped scar from a fall that his friends referred to as the Killer V.

Before I bought the Cannondale from Fortier, I’d been riding a cheap mountain bike bought from a departing Bulletin coworker in 2005. The bike was too small for my frame, and I was on the hunt for a used mountain bike my size when I saw the Killer V in Fortier’s garage. He sold it to me for a song, and I used it at least several times the first few years.

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But months turned into years of the bike hanging from my garage ceiling like a dead bat. In the last few years, Fortier began asking if I’d consider trading it back to his friend for a different bike. From the way it had been lovingly upgraded, the Cannondale would have held sentimental value to anyone — especially someone who was a collector of bikes, as Fortier described him.

I didn’t mean to be stubborn, but I held out. I just liked the bike — or the idea of it, anyway and harbored delusions of getting back out there, and held out for a slightly better bike, never fessing up to myself that I’m just not a mountain biker. I love hiking and running on trails, but the vast majority of my bike riding was simply commuting. If I rode the Killer V at all, it was for commutes in winter, when bike lanes are often full of treacherous cinder. The last time I’d probably done that was before the pandemic hit.

My change of heart was precipitated a few weeks ago by my estimated 30th viewing of “Breaking Away,” a classic 1979 film I first saw in a theater with my dad at age 11. It stars Jackie Earle Haley, Dennis Quaid and Daniel Stern in some of their earliest roles and is a must-see movie if you like underdogs-make-good films. Its script is often described as perfect, and it always moves me.

Watching the movie, in which road races figure heavily, I realized how much I loved, and sorely missed, my old, long-gone 10-speed bikes. I guess I have some bike nostalgia of my own to work out. The next day, determined to reunite Chapman with his old bike, I texted Fortier.

I felt bad about how long I’d stood between Chapman and his bike, but he harbored no ill will. We talked for a good long while, bonding a bit over our shared addiction to our rolling toys. He joked about having a bike problem, and me with my far-too-many complete skateboards a few feet away found that easy to relate to, and impossible to judge.

None of my boards go back to 9th grade, when I got my first real skateboard. I usually threw away my old skate decks. Wiser skate companies will reissue old stuff for the collectors, but for me, a re-creation would never be the same as having back my first real skateboard.

For Chapman, that was now a reality, albeit with his first real mountain bike, and I was almost as happy for him as he was. He told me how he couldn’t believe it when he learned Fortier had sold it not to a stranger, but to a friend, and that Fortier had recently spotted it still hanging in my garage.

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Chapman was further surprised to see I’d made virtually no changes to it — hooray for neglect! Unfortunately, I’d replaced the old hard seat with a cushier one. I promised him I’d return it if it ever turns up.

And if it does, I will return it a lot faster than I had the rest of his bike.

Chapman’s stoke was evident in the name he gave our Venmo transaction: “Cannondale Reunion!”

He later texted me photos of him and the bike with a new seat from his stockpile. With so many bikes at home already, Chapman plans to keep the Killer V at the real estate office where he’s an assistant in real estate appraisal and working to get his license.

When he was still in my driveway, Chapman told me he had to strike while the iron was hot, that he could see himself regretting the decision in a few years if he passed on it, only to be left wondering, “Where is it?”

”It’s not a necessary expense,” he said. “But sentimentally, it kind of is.”

And even if he couldn’t do his own bike tune-ups, I don’t think there’s a bike shop employee in the land who could convince Chapman to part with his bike now.