COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Marissa MacDougall has fond memories of attending Bangor Blue Ox games during the summer of 1996, the year she turned 11. She remembers the night her dad caught a foul ball, and how, after the game, Dave MacDougall took his little girl down to the railing to collect autographs. Since this was independent minor-league baseball, the players were happy to sign. Marissa even got an autograph from Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd, the crowd-pleasing former Boston Red Sox right-hander who in 1996, at age 36, ventured to Maine’s second-largest city and fashioned a 10-0 record for the Blue Ox in a bid to make it back to the majors.But as much as Marissa loved The Can, her favorite member of the Blue Ox was the mascot. That would be Babe the Blue Ox, modeled after the sidekick to the mythical Paul Bunyan, who, legend has it, hailed from Bangor. Babe, a floppy, anthropomorphic ox decked out in a Blue Ox uniform with No. 3 on the back (of course), would cavort with fans, pose for photos and engage in the kind of zany on-field antics that are expected from sports mascots throughout the world.But for the longest time, Marissa didn’t remember she once wrote a fan letter to Babe the Blue Ox. Time marches on, right? The family has long since relocated from the old home on Cumberland Street in Bangor to Phoenix. Now 40, Marissa MacDougall Johnson and her husband, Dave, have three children, including David III, just two months old. Her oldest son, Dominik, is in the Navy, stationed in San Diego. And then there’s her own little girl, 4-year-old Shyloe. With so much on her plate, it’s understandable she might not recall writing a fan letter to a minor-league baseball mascot when she was 11.This takes us to a ceremony that took place a week ago at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Though the Bangor Blue Ox lasted just two seasons, a not uncommon fate in the seat-of-the-pants world of indy minor-league baseball, the Hall of Fame was impressed that much of the team’s papers and correspondence — including dozens of fan letters that had been sent to Babe the Blue Ox — had survived over the years. The Hall reached out to staff members of the ill-fated Blue Ox and said it would be happy to accept the two box loads of material at its A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center. And so on Friday, May 29, after former Blue Ox president Dean Gyorgy headed up a lecture on the team as part of the Hall’s annual Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, everybody stepped into another room for the formal handing-over of all that cool stuff.Marissa MacDougall Johnson holds up a ball signed by Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd and other members of the Bangor Blue Ox. (Courtesy of Marissa MacDougall Johnson)It’s the letters to Babe the Blue Ox from all those youthful, wide-eyed baseball fans from Greater Bangor that really pop. Festooned with stickers, exclamation marks and the kids’ own renderings of the Babe, the letters illustrate how much team mascots resonate with children. Gyorgy and his old buddies from the Blue Ox days had attempted to track down some of those now-grown kids in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, but without much success.And then the phone rang. It was Marissa. Her husband had received a message on his cell phone, something about an old minor-league baseball team from Bangor. Something about a team mascot called Babe the Blue Ox. Something about a fan letter Marissa is said to have written 30 years ago this summer. She said she had no recollection of having written such a letter.An image of the letter was texted to her.“Oh my goodness,” Marissa said over the phone, her voice cracking with emotion. “I do remember writing that letter, now that I’ve seen a picture of it. That’s … wow! Just wow! I didn’t know that they saved those.”There was a pause.She began to sob.Scattered picturesAbout four years before the Bangor Blue Ox even existed, Marissa was diagnosed with epilepsy. She was in the first grade at Bangor’s Abraham Lincoln School and doing just fine until reports were sent home about dizziness and, as her mother, Belinda MacDougall, put it, “just sort of dozing off into space. I was running a daycare center out of my home at the time, and Marissa came home one day from school and fell on the floor and then kept falling as she tried to get up. The little kids thought she was playing with them.”