My friends, the Fergy is back.

It might be called something else, and it might have a few tweaked ingredients. But come next week, the beloved sandwich from the former Luiggi’s in Lewiston will be available at 84 Court Pizza & Restaurante in Auburn.

You can thank Androscoggin County Sheriff Eric Samson for this Thanksgiving miracle.

The sheriff has been so crestfallen — so downright mopey, frankly — since Luiggi’s went out of business, that he’s taken to daydreaming about the Fergy.

Fortunately, he did some of this daydreaming in front of Enka Suli, co-owner of 84 Court and a lady who hates to see a local cop in such agony.

“I told him, ‘We can try it. Why not? We have ham, lettuce, mayo, cheese and tomatoes,” Enka said.

If only it was that easy.

What Enka didn’t have, Samson quickly advised her, was the right bread. As any rabid Fergy fan will tell you — typically poking his finger into your chest for emphasis — you’ve got to have the right bread or you don’t have a Fergy.

“The bread and the lettuce are going to make or break this sandwich,” said Samson, with all the earnestness of a man planning a great military battle. “People think it’s just a ham sandwich but it’s not. It’s the Fergy.”

So with a drooling Samson providing guidance, Enka got to work. She flagged down her bread guy and asked if he knew what kind of bread was used to make the Fergy.

He knew EXACTLY what kind of bread was needed, as it happens, because he used to deliver to Luiggi’s.

Bread? Check. Enka got just enough to make a sample Fergy, with more expected to arrive at the start of next week.

She then got busy putting together the sandwich, careful to follow Samson’s pedantic instructions to the letter.

Never — and he means EVER! — use shredded lettuce on a Fergy. It has to be iceberg and it has to be crisp.

Onions, the other critical Fergy ingredient, are not to be simply piled onto the sandwich, he added, they have to be strewn across it in just the right way.

And so on and so forth.

Enka took notes on all of this and with the help of her husband, Genti, they created a Fergy prototype for Samson alone.

The moment of truth had arrived.

“It was good,” Samson said as diplomatically as possible. “But there’s just something missing.”

You could practically hear the sad trombone. But fortunately, a fellow Fergy enthusiast happened to be walking by at that very moment.

“Cheese,” she told the group. “You’re missing the cheese.”

So a slice of cheese was applied to the experiment and … eureka! As far as Samson is concerned, a miracle worthy of harps and doves was performed right there on Court Street.

“This is it!” the sheriff declared. “This is perfect! It’s the sandwich I’ve enjoyed my whole life; the sandwich I always looked forward to!”

And like a man announcing the fulfilling of a prophecy, Samson boldly declared that the Fergy had been re-created, truly and deliciously. The bread was just right, he said. The onions were strewn in the proper way and the lettuce provided that crunchiness Fergy freaks remember from childhood.

Samson, so moved by his reacquaintance with the Fergy, waxes nostalgic.

It was his father, Lewiston police Officer Paul Samson, who introduced him to the Fergy somewhere near 50 years ago, and for a young Eric, it was love at first bite.

“It was the perfect sandwich,” he said, “especially in the summer. You’d get it wrapped up in that paper and take it wherever you were going.”

He’d pick up a Fergy on his way home after school at St. Joe’s. He and his friends would grab Fergies if they were off to a field trip or the beach.

For Samson and a whole generation of frothing Fergy fans, enjoyment of the sandwich is almost as much about nostalgia as it is ham, bread, crispy lettuce, etc.

Almost.

And so earlier in the year, when a local couple bought Luiggi’s from the original owners, legions of Fergy fans had high hopes that the sandwich would remain.

But those attempts to recreate the sandwich failed, according to many who tried the revamped version, and the new owners shut the restaurant down once and for all after five months of trying to update the place while also pleasing Luiggi’s stalwarts.

Now Enka and Genti Suli are feeling the pressure of trying to bring the Fergy back from the dead. They have seen firsthand how the hordes of Fergy fans demand absolute perfection when it comes to this sandwich, after all.

God only knows what kind of unrest would follow another Fergy failure.

Samson believes they’ve done it, but the general public won’t be able to weigh in until next week, when 84 Court has enough of the proper bread to put the sandwich on the menu.

And a few questions still remain.

Will it still be called the Fergy or is that cherished name the domain of the former owners?

Will the one or two small tweaks Enka plans for the sandwich pass the Fergy taste test when the masses have their say?

Samson is so confident the Fergy is coming back for real that he’s been spreading the word among his fellow cops who tend to frequent 84 Court for lunch breaks. He even shared this big news on Facebook, betting his pristine reputation that others will love Fergy 2.0 the way he loves it.

“Best news ever!” declared one local woman.

“My absolute favorite sandwich!” offered another.

Some have suggested that the new sandwich might be called The Samson in honor of the man who made it all happen, and there’s a fitting irony in that.

The fact that it’s a cop so valiantly trying to bring the Fergy back echoes back to the 1960s when the sandwich was first created at the request of one Arthur R. Ferguson, a Lewiston police detective in search of a perfect sandwich to get him through long shifts.

Back then, it was Ferguson who gave the sandwich the official thumbs up at Luiggi’s and it was ultimately named in his honor.

Samson, as humble as he is hungry, doesn’t care much what they name the sandwich. As long as the lettuce is crispy and he can see teeth marks in the bread when he bites into it, he’s good to go.

He thinks 84 Court Pizza will do well with the new sandwich, too, even if the Fergy has been connected to Lewiston for so long.

Will famished Fergy fans be willing to travel to Auburn for their fix, one wonders?

The sheriff isn’t sweating it.

If you build it, he figures, they will come.