Joomla 3.6.2 and K2 2.7.1, SEF enabled

Everything was working perfectly. I temporarily unpublished a menu item (title alias: reaching-us) for a K2 item (ID 92.) Worked on an unrelated thing (adding some menu items not connected to this one) and then republished the menu item. The SEF URL /reaching-us that previously worked, now changes to /item/92/reaching-us and returns the the top page of the site, NOT the K2 item page 92. If I test with SEF off (reaching-us/?sef=0) the correct K2 item page loads fine.

If I add a trailing slash (/reaching-us/) it works fine, but I never had to do that previously.

I have rebuilt the menus, cleared caches, checked everything I can think of and cannot restore access to /reaching-us again. To my knowledge there are no duplicate aliases.

What on earth did i do wrong and what is the best way to fix this? I have many menu-item-alias links pointing to ID92 but that shouldn't matter.

Thanks much for any tips.

Did you change anything in your .htaccess file?
Do the other URLs work without slashes?

Thank you for the quick reply.

I see that I made a paste-typo on the URL that gets created, sorry. It should read: item/92-reaching-us rather than item/92/reaching-us. You probably figured that out but just in case. :)

No changes to .htaccess. This is a long-time site (almost two years) running with no material changes other than content. Even the menu items rarely change but for the occasional addition. I am 99.9% certain that what I did (unpublishing the main menu item) and then republishing it are what caused this issue to appear as I'd accessed the reaching-us URL just fine seconds before my changes.

Yes, other SEF URLs work identically, with or without the trailing slash. Except for this one, of course. Works with it but not without it. Child menu items under reaching-use work fine, too., i.e., reaching-us/school (with or without the trailing slash.)

I can hack around in the back-end database tables pretty well if need be, that was going to be my next step, to check what might be different about this menu item from the others that still work normally. Might be time-consuming but the /reaching-us URL is my top traffic page so I have to get this fixed. Right now it's just resolving back to the home page of the site, a crazy loop.

Edited to add screenshot of the menu items database table - maybe there's a clue that I'm not seeing because I've been staring at it for too long. DB table

The db looks as it should.

Normally K2 follows Joomla!'s router, so the issue could be a wrong redirect.
Can you double check the redirect component?

Well, the problem is gone. I wish I could definitively say I know how it was fixed but I can't. For the record, in case anyone searches and runs into this:

I do have a third-party redirect plugin (Dynamic 404) running normally but I'd disabled it immediately after first running into this issue and cleared the cache, and that hadn't solved the issue so I kept searching. However, with your pointer to a redirect issue, I took another look at that. I enabled Dynamic 404 as well as the system redirect, then disabled all again and cleared every cache. At that point, the problem went away for good and the /reaching-us URL behaved normally. I re-enabled the redirect plug-in pieces one-by-one and the problem has yet to return. So far, so good!

I know Chrome has sporadic stubbornness holding onto cached URLs so maybe it was a combination of that and/or the Dynamic 404 plugin. Regardless, it's working so thanks for your help.

You 're welcome :)
Nice to hear that the issue has been resolved.