...when you have uploaded a scan of a baseball card onto your ancestry.com family tree, to serve as the picture you see for a distant cousin
...when you look up a player on Baseball Reference, and recognize which card his cropped profile picture was borrowed from
...when a non-collector friend 1000 miles away calls to ask if he is getting a good deal on an autographed card of a favorite wrestler
...when one of your biggest regrets in life is turning down a spot in a card set
...when you find the card shop in a new city before you find an apartment, and by the time you find the apartment, you know the dealer well enough that he helps you move in
...when that same dealer invites you to his home for Christmas eve dinner, and you recognize the other customers he invited too
...when you keep hundreds of photographs of athletes you absolutely despise, from teams you wouldn't support if your life depended on it, because those photographs exist in the form of a card
...when you know the names of characters in movies you never saw, based on the Topps card set that was released the same year
...when you decide which baseball game to attend based on when the card set giveaway happens
...when a Hall of Fame vote results in hours of work, rearranging your collection
I'm going to reevaluate how I collect after the new year. It's just getting way too expensive for the new stuff. Sometimes I just want to buy a pack, not a whole box or even blaster.