And how something made as a children’s play thing evolved into one of the most coveted objects in sports. But I also wanted to learn more about this special card: where it came from, how it was made, why someone would spend millions of dollars to own a perfect specimen of it. I wanted to know if I was sitting on a winning lottery ticket. But reading stories about the soaring prices for Gretzky rookie cards during the pandemic, I decided that it was time to find out. Maybe I liked the mystery, the idea that this modest piece of cardboard might one day change my life – or not. Yet I had never been motivated to find out just how valuable. I’ve always known I was holding onto something special – a relic of my childhood, yes, but also something valuable. Since then, it’s lived in shoe boxes and cookie tins and cupboards in Calgary, London, Ont., Vancouver and Toronto. I’ve had it since it showed up 43 years ago in a pack of 14 random cards, wrapped in waxy paper along with a rock-hard stick of bubble gum, at a corner store a couple of blocks from my childhood home in Calgary. The O-Pee-Chee company's legacy as an icon of the sports-collectibles industry began in the 1930s, when its founders decided to start putting trading cards in their packs of bubble gum.
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