For a long time, this was the truth about collecting baseball and hockey cards, among other pieces of sports memorabilia.

Little kids traded them among their friends, threw them against walls or clothes-pinned them to the spokes of their bicycles, only to later regret not storing them in hermetically sealed packaging to maintain razor-sharp edges. Meanwhile, big kids — or rather, rich men with or without a nostalgic attachment to sports history — bought and sold the best cards at eye-popping prices, turning big piles of money into bigger piles.

So the idea of owning a famed Honus Wagner T206 baseball card — one of which was famously purchased by Wayne Gretzky and then-L.A. Kings owner Bruce McNall in 1991 for a then-record $451,000 (U.S.) — was as unlikely as emerging from the 1980s with a collection of Gretzky rookie cards in mint condition.

But owning a piece of the high-end card market has lately become more approachable. While it’s still unlikely the average fan can afford to own a Wagner T206, it’s recently become possible to at least own a fraction of one. Shares of a Wagner T206 with an estimated value of $600,000 were recently on sale for about $60 apiece on Rally, one of a handful of so-called fractional-investing platforms that includes high-end sports memorabilia among its collection of offerings. Over at Collectable, a fractional-investing app solely dedicated to sports artifacts, a 1953 Topps Mickey Mantle card with an estimated price tag of $2.5 million was recently offered to the public with shares starting at $25 apiece.

The concept is similar to that of a stock exchange. A typical investor can’t afford to acquire, say, Facebook, given that the company’s value is approaching $1 trillion. But many investors can afford to own shares of Facebook, which, as of Friday afternoon, were going for something in the range of $253 apiece.

“If you look historically at returns across the sports memorabilia category, the financial returns are beyond impressive,” said Ezra Levine, CEO of Collectable. “But the problem has been that the best opportunities have been at the upper end of the market, which has been completely unavailable to people like you and me. It’s an industry whose upside has been tremendous, but only if you can afford to partake in it.”

That’s becoming more and more the case. Among the many byproducts of the global pandemic has been a considerable boom in the trading card market. Last month, a Mike Trout rookie card sold for $3.9 million, breaking the all-time price record for a sports card set by a Wagner T206 in 2016. In July, a LeBron James rookie card sold at auction for $1.8 million. There’ve been plenty more stories of lesser cards seeing big increases in prices.

“It’s a really great question. I think everyone in the hobby is a little head-scratching right now in terms of what exactly it is that’s driving this whole move (upward),” said Levine, a former Wall Street analyst. “It’s probably a combination of factors.”

One, said Levine, is that various influencers — among them entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, he of the 8 million Instagram followers — have shared their interest in buying and selling cards with their large audiences. (“I don’t think people understand that sports cards are going to become a cultural phenomenon again, so I’m just putting it on the record,” Vaynerchuk presciently told sports broadcaster Rich Eisen in April of 2019).

Another is an influx of institutional capital into the sports memorabilia space, perhaps in search of an alternative to tumultuous stock markets.

“We look at it as a method of diversification,” said Rob Petrozzo, one of the co-founders of Rally. “Everybody should be diversified. What we’ve seen is that a (retirement fund made up of stocks) is great to have. But it’s not as interesting as investing in that Michael Jordan rookie card or something that really has a resonance and a history that a public company might not.”

Beyond that, industry voices say, the pandemic has brought with it an appetite to celebrate simpler times.

“Nostalgia is so important now,” said Petrozzo. “It’s peace of mind to everybody to connect to these moments from your childhood, especially around the people and places you held in high regard.”

Fractional investing isn’t new. It’s been a staple of the horse racing business for years. You’ve long been able to buy fractional ownership of a private jet or a yacht. And there are myriad companies currently offering the public the opportunity to buy shares in everything from artwork to classic cars and vintage comic books to Pokemon cards (sets of which can go for something in the range of $250,000).

There’s a downside to owning a fraction of a great piece of sports memorabilia: You don’t actually get to possess the object. Rally, which started out as a marketplace for the fractional ownership of rare automobiles, owns a gallery space in New York City where it displays some of its jewels, in part to give investors access to their purchases. While Collectable is considering future events where investors might lay eyes on the merchandise, the company’s array of assets are mostly stored in best-in-class vaults in the name of security and safety.

“I don’t know if I can guarantee you’ll ever have the ability to physically touch it or lay eyes on it,” Levine said. “Our duty is to the hundreds of shareholders who own a part of that item. It’s a huge responsibility for us to protect it, to preserve it. But we are looking into ways to give some of those benefits to shareholders.”

Far beyond mere sentiment, there’s an expectation of financial gain in the fractional-investing game. As attached as one might become to owning a piece of a 1953 Topps Mickey Mantle card, the ultimate goal is profit. To that end, standard practice among fractional investing platforms is to put offers to acquire an asset to a shareholder vote, with theoretical profits distributed on a pro-rated basis.

“To say that everything will always go up is obviously not the case,” said Petrozzo. “But with sports memorabilia having a moment right now, we’ve seen two or three of these assets trade up by hundreds of percentage points.”

There was a time when only the rich reaped the benefits of such big increases in card prices. More than a decade after Gretzky and McNall sold that Wagner T206 for $500,000, for instance, the same card changed hands for more than five times that price (this before its reputation took a hit, after a previous owner of the card confessed in federal court to altering it to increase its value). All these years later, the barrier to entry for a piece of such action is considerably lower.

“For a long time, if you were wealthy, you could play in this space. If you weren’t wealthy, you were priced out of it,” said Levine. “For the first time in history, this is becoming a space that regular people are able to invest in.”