A 1952 Topps sealed pack, graded PSA 7, sold for $91,000 on Sunday night.
And despite what appears to be an outrageous price for a pack of five cards that originally cost five cents, the elephant in the room is that anyone who opens that pack has no chance of getting the card — a No. 311 Mickey Mantle.
You see, PSA has graded 29 packs of 1952 Topps Baseball, and it's believed none of them have the coveted Mantle in them.
There's a reason for this.
Most collectors know the Mantle card was at the end (No. 311) of an ambitious 407-card set that came out in six waves. And most know that by the time packs with the Mantle came out, kids were going back to school and were disinterested.
After struggling to sell those cards for eight years, the later cards in the set were dumped into the ocean.
In fact, there has been only one discovery of high-number packs ever made.
In the winter of 2004, a man brought a full box of 1952 Topps to auction house MastroNet Inc. It contained 23 unopened packs and one opened pack. The man had said he opened the pack as a boy in 1952, ate the gum and put the five cards back in the box.
His father, who got the box from a Topps executive, put it away to avoid opening up all the packs on the same day. And, for some reason, the box went untouched for five decades.
The five cards that were opened were not valuable at all on their own. But two of them helped the box skyrocket in price.
First card up? Bill Posedel.
The young boy had no clue who Posedel was, and no one could blame him. The MLB journeyman, with a lifetime record of 41-43, was now the Pittsburgh Pirates pitching coach.
But flipping the card on the back revealed Posedel was card No. 361.
Next up was Cal Abrams of the Cincinnati Reds. Abrams was a lifetime .269 hitter, having never hit more than 15 homers in his eight MLB seasons.
But Abrams was card No. 350.
The other three cards had lower numbers, but Posedel and Abrams did the trick. When connoisseurs reviewed the open pack more than a half-century later, they confirmed only Posedel and Abrams could have been in the high-number series, the last of the wave, that included the Mantle, Jackie Robinson and the Eddie Mathews rookie.
When the auction took place in April 2004, the winner of the box, with each of the packs individually encapsulated by now-defunct GAI, got it for $208,740. But three months later, it was back on the market at Leland's, only explained by a note in the catalog that the buyer had to give it up for "personal reasons."
The second time the packs sold, they went for $166,850 to Tri-Star founder Jeff Rosenberg.
"I remember three people bidding that day in Houston," Rosenberg recalled. "Myself, (BBCE founder) Steve Hart and Mark Murphy (The Baseball Card Kid).
"After I won, I remember Steve came up to me and said, 'Great buy!' Mark said something like, 'You are a f-ing idiot, I can't believe you paid that much."
"I was younger, and if I bought that, it would have cleaned me out," recalled Hart, whose Baseball Card Exchange went on to be the authority on authentic sealed boxes.
There's really not a great comp to be had, given that no other high-number packs have emerged. In February, a collector paid $873,000 at Morphy Auctions for a brick of eight 1952 Topps packs, which were known to be regular, low-number packs.
The consignor paid $1,000 a pack in 1991 and opened some of them. In it was a perfect card No. 1 of Andy Pafko. Still the only 1952 Pafko graded a PSA 10, the card sold for $83,870 in 1998. The lore of the card is a theme of the 2010 movie "Cop Out," where Bruce Willis' character gets his Pafko stolen.
With a Mantle in a PSA 9 worth more than $12 million today, Hart said packs of the high-number series would go for five times the others ($500,000 a pack), which would make Rosenberg's box worth nearly $12 million alone.
Is Rosenberg a seller?
"I would never say never," Rosenberg said. "Because never is a long time."
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectible market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.