A family cat who got lost amid a move from California across the US is said to be settling back into his old ways with his humans at their new home in Georgia after experiencing an unlikely – but long hoped for – reunion more than seven years in the making.

As owner Amber Davidson-Orozco put in an interview Wednesday, her cat Dodger still responds to his name and allows her sons to flip him playfully over their shoulders despite an absence from them that to the cat lasted the equivalent of roughly 24 years.

“Oh, he’s there. That super sweet, cuddly, social temperament is still there,” Davidson-Orozco remarked of Dodger. Referring to her sons Schylar and Zachary, who were about age eight and five respectively, and had lost their father when the cat vanished, Davidson said Dodger’s reappearance was as if a piece of their childhood had come back, saying: “That’s important.”

Dodger’s return to Davidson-Orozco’s family had captured national media attention in recent weeks. Besides serving as an emotional salve to media consumers drained by intense news cycles, it has also been held up as an example of how vital it can be to microchip pets – because Dodger’s being microchipped set the stage for his eventual reunion with his humans.

Dodger’s humans adopted him from Miss Winkles Pet Adoption center in Clovis, California, in 2016. Named after the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team its family supported, the cat firmly secured a place in their hearts and became another one of them, Davidson-Orozco recounted.

The father of Davidson-Orozco’s children died unexpectedly toward the end of 2018, and her family subsequently decided to move to Florida. She said she entrusted a friend to move Dodger along with the family’s possessions to a new home. Yet Dodger escaped from the friend’s vehicle and would not be seen again, at least not for a good while.

“We always thought about him” in the ensuing years and wondered what his fate may have been, said Davidson-Orozco, whose family later moved to Calhoun, Georgia, north of Atlanta. “It was like that one thing you keep thinking about.”

Then, in February, someone in the California community of Madera – about 31 miles (49.9 km) from Clovis – found a stray Dodger and brought him in for neutering as well as vaccination at an organization named Fresno Trap and Release (TNR). Veterinarians soon realized Dodger had already been neutered and even had a microchip, a scan of which revealed the cat belonged to Davidson-Orozco’s family.

Sydney Sherman of Fresno TNR, who runs the non-profit group alongside her mother, contacted Davidson-Orozco about Dodger. As she wrote on a social media post, Sherman was flying to Florida in late March for a wedding, and she offered to bring Dodger with her if Davidson-Orozco wanted.

“His family was so excited,” Sherman wrote, adding that she shared videos as well as pictures of Dodger with Davidson-Orozco, and held FaceTime calls with her household.

Sherman described herself as “freaking out” because she had never previously flown with a cat. But the trip went relatively smoothly. And, Sherman said, Davidson-Orozco’s family drove seven hours from Calhoun to meet her at 5am “to pick up their sweet little man”.

Sherman said parting with “the handsome, talkative” Dodger was difficult because he won over those at Fresno TNR during the time he had stayed with them. Nonetheless, Sherman wrote, the organization was “very happy to finally have him home where he belongs with his boys”.

Davidson-Orozco thanked Sherman and her team for “giving their all” to Dodger and her family, who in Calhoun were more than 2,300 miles away from Clovis.

She said reuniting with Dodger and finding in the following weeks that he remained just as they remembered him brought a measure of healing in connection with a difficult time in her and her sons; lives.

“It’s full circle – losing all your stuff and belongings while having to move, losing your dad, and you get this back,” Davidson-Orozco said. “It seems silly – like it’s just a silly cat. But to the kids and I, it’s different – and it’s because of the timing.”

She also pleaded with owners of pets to microchip them if they haven’t already.

“When you get an animal, you’re obviously not thinking of anything going wrong or anything like that,” Davidson-Orozco said. “But things happen. Situations happen.”