There wasn't a kid in my grade school who didn't get something stuck in the ceiling of a public building. They'd become mini-monuments, something we'd all walk by and say "remember when Stuart squeezed the ketchup pack so hard it hit the ceiling? It's still there!" It's nice to know this is a long standing practice:

The family of a boy whose tennis ball got stuck high up in a cathedral archway have asked for it back - almost a century later.

It has been lodged in the mouldings of Lincoln Cathedral since 1914.

Even better is that, apparently, nobody else had ever noticed it was there. But then the story takes a downright educational twist:

The ball is believed to be among the oldest surviving examples in the UK.

The earliest proper tennis ball held in the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum dates from 1916, while Gilbert Bell's is from at least 1914.

Somehow I don't think "I'm trying to preserve history!" will get much sympathy from my wife or the priest were I to try and save a modern tennis ball in the same way.