We know how it is.

You’re striding along the downtown streets on your way to trouble when you find yourself tantalized by a fat Amazon box on some stranger’s porch.

Or maybe you just happened to be in the area when the UPS guy dropped a tasty looking package on some fool’s steps and now that package is just sitting there, waiting to be grabbed.

Why, it’s like Christmas morning out there and it happens every single day!

We all know that the sticky-fingered thieves known as “porch pirates” are everywhere and we all despise them.

But aspiring porch bandits should take a pause before snatching that tempting REI box or seductive crate from Target. There’s a new crime-fighting duo in town and at least one would-be thief has been sent packing because of it.

Their names are Kerrie Fogg and Anastasia Conway and one early evening last week, they were wheeling by Shawmut Street in Lewiston when they spotted a potential porch thief in his natural environment.

“We saw this suspicious looking guy tucking a package under his jacket,” Fogg says. “And I was like, ‘Hmmm. This doesn’t look right.'”

The shady character then walked to the doorway of a downtown laundromat, hungrily opened the package in question and hauled the product from inside.

It would be an easy enough kind of scene to dismiss, but Conway and Fogg (which would be a great television crime show title, now that I think of it) weren’t having it.

Conway, who hails from Boston, was particularly riled.

“She is definitely not about this kind of thing,” Fogg says. “She said, ‘he’s stealing a package and I’m doing something about it.”

With that, Anastasia jumped out of the car and inspected the box the thief had left behind. It was from Chewy, a company noted for pricey pet food, much of it medicinal.

Fogg and Conway are pet owners, by the way. If that thief wasn’t in peril before, he definitely was once the ladies clapped eyes on that Chewy label.

Anastaisa, as I may have mentioned, wasn’t having it.

“She didn’t give any kind of warning,” Fogg says, laughing a little. “She just ran off after him. He was wearing a big jacket and a hat and I don’t think he ever heard her coming.”

Some will wince at Conway’s approach, citing the danger and all that, but once Conway was in, she was in with both feet.

She snatched the package from the man’s hands. She demanded to know why he was stealing cat food. She scolded him. Warned him. Pretty much reduced the ham-handed porch pirate to a stammering mess.

After enduring Conway’s wrath, the man mumbled an apology, promised to change his ways, and went shuffling off into the night.

Which could have been the end of it. Conway and Fogg had the package in hand and they would just drive back a couple blocks and return it to the owner. A nice, neat tale of vigilantism and cats that won’t go hungry because of this heroic action.

But no. Porch pirates, like the high seas pirates before them, don’t give up so easily when it comes to the pursuit of loot.

Conway and Fogg had driven just a few blocks when they spotted the man again along Pine Street. There he was, skulking, creeping, lurking … doing all those things that petty thieves do when they’re fixing to steal something.

When the ladies saw the man peering onto porches, just minutes after getting stone-cold busted, they could hardly believe it.

It was clear what had to be done.

Fogg pulled to the side of the road and once again, Conway jumped out.

You can kind of picture this scene. There’s the would-be thief, quivering once again in his over-sized coat as Conway goes one side up him and down the other.

She yelled at the thief some more but in much a louder voice. She cursed him and warned the shivering dolt to clear out of the neighborhood. The fumbling thief could only stand there in trembling distress as Conway rained hellfire down upon him.

“He was definitely scared,” Fogg says. “She’s intimidating, I’m not going to lie. He may have pooped his pants, let’s just say that.”

When it was over, the thief went scuttling off, presumably in shame and fright, and hasn’t been seen since.

Conway and Fogg (really, I like this TV show idea more and more) huffed and puffed a little longer, and then considered the package they had recovered.

“I rescue cats all around the city,” Fogg says. “I know how expensive Chewy food is and that kind of leveled up the anger part — especially when I saw that it was prescription food.”

That box of food may have run $50 or more and was likely essential to keep some older woman’s pet alive a little bit longer.

Nobody has a guess as to what the porch pirate thought he was going to do with this particular haul.

Not that it matters anymore, because immediately after chasing off the thief, Conway and Fogg drove back to the owner’s house and knocked on the door.

A man in his 80s answered. His wife had ordered the medicated pet food for her cat, as it turns out, and would have sorely missed it had it been successfully stolen.

The man was grateful, for sure. And also a little bit bewildered.

Fogg chuckles at this. “I mean, imagine two girls coming up to you like this and saying, ‘We just saved your package!”

The public, meanwhile, was overjoyed to hear about the efforts of Conway and Fogg in chasing down at least one porch pirate in a city full of them. So overjoyed, in fact, that efforts were underway to come up with an appropriate name for the unlikely pair of crime fighters.

Porch Avengers? Package Defenders? Deck-tectives?

A few people, meanwhile, cautioned the ladies that approaching a suspected criminal on the street like that could be dangerous. You never know the state of a man’s mind, after all, or what weapon he might have stuffed in his belt.

But Conway and Fogg were so outraged at the flagrant thievery before their eyes that night, they were spurred to action instead of fear.

“In that moment, you just don’t think of all that crap,” Fogg says.

She and Conway bought a house in the area in 2018 and found themselves surrounded by more crime and violence than they’d anticipated. But in the midst of all that, they also committed themselves to helping their neighbors in any way they can.

“People around here are all about minding their own business,” Fogg says. “And you can mind your business to a certain extent, but sometimes it comes down to morals. You have to be the change you want to see in the world.”

Right now, Conway and Fogg are keeping their eyes open for anymore porch thieves that might scuttle by, but they also have a new target; namely a different breed of thieves who have been raiding trash cans on garbage pickup day and making one hell of a mess in the process.

“And now I can’t even put my barrels out the night before,” Fogg says, “because many times they’ve opened my litter box bags and scattered it everywhere.”

And there you have it; the latest challenge for this crime-fighting couple whose official title is pending a forthcoming explosion of creative inspiration.

Seriously, it’s going to come to me any minute now.

Porch Police? Porch Rangers? Guardians of the Porch Realm?

Yep. Any minute now.