What we wouldn’t all give to be the lucky stiffs who stumbled upon a couple of million dollars worth of baseball cards. You can read all about Defiance’s most recent famous family elsewhere among these pages.

The guess here is most of us handled similar youthful artifacts the same way. We neatly divvied baseball cards in a cigar box. We rolled eyes at yet another wee Hank Aguirre placard. We flipped our buddies for their best — the card on top wins. We mashed them in bicycle spokes.

We set our cards aside. Then they were gone.

That was the fate of all my miniature NFL helmets, too. The magnet back of a belt buckle was the perfect hook for fishing down a pop machine’s cap container. Out they’d come, bunches of sticky bottle caps with logos stamped on the inside. Collect enough and trade Coke for helmets.

Sweet.

Mom didn’t follow baseball. But I suspect that she knew Mantle and Maris were criss-crossing their bats in 8-by-10, black-and-white wonderment in the back of a socks package. She pretended otherwise.

All it took was one session of Strat-O-Matic Baseball to hook me. Within a couple days I had a homemade version humming. Kept stats, too. Dad assured me that Dodgers was not pronounced with a hard “gh.”

None of that long ago stuff — if hidden and recovered in pristine condition — would fetch millions like that Defiance family will reap. But we all know their worth.

Priceless.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2381 or mpendleton@coxohio.com.