When a card from the 1980s sells for big money, the cries of "I have that!" can be heard across the hobby.
Moments later, that euphoria is dampened by the understanding the card was only worth that because it was a gem-mint example, and anything less than a perfect 10 is worth a fraction of that price.
Perhaps no card in the last four years has generated that exact scenario more than the 1986 Topps Jerry Rice rookie card.
For card collectors, 1986 was a seminal year. It was the first year other major sports cards could regularly be found amongst the hoard of baseball cards. Fleer started producing basketball, and Topps stepped up football following the success of his loaded 1984 set.
Anyone who collected baseball in 1986 likely dabbled in the others.
So, when a 1986 Topps Jerry Rice PSA 10 sold for $125,655 on eBay in Feb. 2021, countless collectors and former collectors started rifling through their binders to find the card they knew they kept.
There was a slight problem.
In a business where a perfectly-graded card is coveted, the 1986 Topps football set, while well mass produced, does not grade well.
Only 4% of 1986 Topps Football cards submitted to PSA came back as 10s. Compare that to 1986 Topps Baseball (18%), 1986 Fleer Baseball (27%) and 1986 Donruss Baseball (28%).
And then there are the cards that are even harder.
According to GemRate, a company that tracks the ratio of cards to those perfectly graded, Steve Young's 1986 Topps card has "gemmed" only 0.1% of the time across PSA, BGS and SGC.
The No. 2 card in the set is Young's future teammate, Rice, who is at 0.2%.
There have been 57,744 Rice cards submitted to the three companies and only 125 have come back perfect.
PSA alone has graded exactly 39,000 Rice rookies, of which 63 have graded 10 (.16%). Only three post-1980 cards that have been graded more than 15,000 times are rarer in a 10: The Rickey Henderson 1980 Topps rookie (0.064%), the Derek Jeter 1993 Upper Deck SP Foil Rookie (0.086%) and the Magic/Bird/Dr. J 1980-81 Topps card (0.16%).
So, that's why when one hits the market — one of the PSA 10s will sell tonight at Heritage Auctions — the bidding goes through the roof.
Six have been sold since the beginning of 2023, with an average price of $70,000.
When the Rice rookie sells Friday night, another group of prospectors will surely pull out their cards and send them to PSA. But the chances of hitting the lottery seem to be lessening.
As of March 2021, PSA graded 86,621 cards from 1986 Topps Football, with 5,302 cards graded a 10, according to GemRate.
Since then, PSA has graded 46,509 cards from the set with 527 graded 10s. That's a drop from 6.1% to 1.1%.
The Rice card shows a more drastic drop.
As of March 2021, PSA graded 23,386 Rice cards with 58 of them getting 10s. Since then, PSA has graded 15,607 Rice cards with only five getting gem-mint grades, according to GemRate.
That's a drop from 0.24% getting 10s to just 0.03% gemming.
Don't go running off to SGC either. Out of the 6,388 Rice rookies SGC has graded, one has garnered a 10 grade.
That's why a 10 sells for a huge number, and why the drop off to a 9 (worth $2,000) and an 8 ($200) is so absurdly steep.
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.