Who remembers Mink? A black bear that for years roamed woods and scavenged trash bins in the heart of the Upper Valley, Mink was named for Hanover’s Mink Brook Nature Preserve, where she often made a den and raised cubs for the better part of two decades.

Mink died in 2020, but her legacy was top of mind this week as we reach the end of Chris Sununu’s eight years as New Hampshire’s governor.

What does a dead bear have to do with Sununu’s tenure in the corner office? More on that in a bit, but first, how should Granite Staters consider the Sununu years?

Sununu’s father is also a former New Hampshire governor and was chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush until a scandal involving the use of military jets for personal travel made him a national punchline and forced him to resign.

There was every indication that the younger Sununu might try to use his office as a launching pad to return his family to the White House in 2024. Ultimately, Sununu stayed on the sidelines nationally. Or rather, Donald Trump kept him there.

But as preposterous as it looks in hindsight, given Trump’s dominance, there was a time when an alternative political reality was not considered far-fetched — where Republicans moved on from Trump and chose a moderate like Nikki Haley as a standard-bearer. And Sununu certainly would have been bandied about as a Haley running mate, offering the electorate a nonthreatening, quarter-zipped, Republican version of Tim Walz.

Despite Sununu foregoing a national campaign, Upper Valley residents still had a better chance of seeing him on a political chat show than they did in this neck of the woods.

Sununu became the go-to Republican for half-hearted condemnations of Trump, before it became clear that Trump — despite the events of Jan. 6 — still held sway with the vast majority of Republican voters. Sununu last summer fell back in line and declared his fealty, no doubt to maintain any hope of future political viability.

Just as Sununu failed to persuade Republicans to move on from Trump, he repeatedly failed to persuade the New Hampshire Executive Council to act in the best interest of the state’s residents. On multiple occasions, the council’s Republican members held up public health contracts with Planned Parenthood on purely ideological grounds.

When Democrats briefly gained control of the House and Senate in Concord in the 2018 midterm backlash against Trump, Sununu responded in the most partisan way possible.

In two years, he issued 77 vetoes, more than three times what any of his recent predecessors had issued in a single term. Plans for impartial redistricting, abolition of the death penalty, background checks for gun sales, universal paid family leave and dozens of other bipartisan initiatives were subject to Sununu’s political tantrum.

Contrast that with the next biennium when extremists in his own party adopted the first abortion restrictions in the state’s modern history. The law required every woman in New Hampshire seeking an abortion to undergo an invasive internal ultrasound procedure regardless of medical need. Sununu signed the legislation into law even after having expressed his own opposition to some of the measures.

While the ultrasound mandate was later repealed after public outcry, the abortion restrictions stand, and the episode was another example of a supposed teller of hard truths being unwilling to stand up to his own party.

Some of Sununu’s other “highlights”:

■Empowering an education commissioner determined to siphon money from public schools to private schools that are allowed to discriminate against applicants and don’t have any accountability to taxpayers.

■His handpicked attorney general thought an out-of-state, for-profit health corporation was a better partner for a struggling New Hampshire hospital than Lebanon-based nonprofit Dartmouth Health.

■ Sununu publicly scolded a jury that — after a two-week trial that the governor never attended — acquitted a truck driver charged in connection with a fatal accident.

■Last spring, when college students in Hanover and Durham exercised their free speech rights to criticize the scale of Israel’s military response in Gaza, Sununu accused the peaceful protesters of being motivated by “pure antisemitism.”

■And the Sununu administration also failed to take meaningful action on education funding, the housing crisis and high utility prices.

But the episode that might best capture the Sununu era takes us back to our friend Mink.

It was the spring of 2017 and Mink and her cubs had become notorious for trying to enter homes in search of food. Concerned for public safety, state wildlife officials determined the best course of action was to round up the bears and have them destroyed.

Enter Sununu, who had been in office just a few months and had made being an “animal guy” part of his suburban dad schtick on the campaign trail. Despite being warned about the pitfalls of his plan, he insisted the bears be relocated to far northern New Hampshire rather than be destroyed.

The trio of yearlings were captured and shipped north. One of the bears was shot and killed in Quebec within weeks of being released.

Mink evaded capture until the following summer, when she was trapped with a quartet of new cubs. The orphaned cubs were shipped off to a refuge, but Mink was shipped north, again against the recommendation of the state’s bear biologist. He cautioned that black bears are highly territorial and that Mink would likely return to the Upper Valley.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. Mink undertook a meandering, perilous journey over thousands of miles through the territories of other hostile bears to find her way home.

By 2019, she made it back to Hanover, and in the spring of 2020, she was spotted with a new litter. Later that summer, Mink was found dead alongside the Mascoma River, leaving three more orphaned cubs. Wildlife officials think she may have been struck by a car on nearby Interstate 89.

After all that, it seems reasonable to ask whether Mink was better off for Sununu’s involvement.

And after eight years of Sununu’s leadership in Concord, we might reasonably ask, are we?

Matt Clary can be reached at mclary@vnews.com.