THE TICKET was in one of his pockets and stayed there during the game. He discovered it later that evening when he rode the train back from the city and returned to his freshman dorm room, as he set his personal items on the desk before bed. Mike Cole would’ve taken the ticket and either opened the tiny desk drawer at the side of the room by the window and stored it inside, or placed it on one of the shelves in his closet above a pile of dirty laundry and his low-top Nike basketball shoes.
Thirty-seven years later, in the winter of 2021, Cole was watching a newscast one evening when a headline flashed on the screen. He immediately stumbled into the basement of his Connecticut home and turned the lights on. He almost slipped going down the stairs and made his way to the auxiliary closet and the plastic bin with “MIKE’S MEMORY BOX” written in Sharpie on recycled duct tape on the side. The manila folder was still in there, and the ticket, too, with all the other tickets, where it had landed for years after following him around for most of his adult life.
It had a reminder on the back about the box office hours of Chicago Stadium in 1984, noon to 6 p.m. except Sundays, and a block paragraph of microscopic typeface that the service charge was nonrefundable and neither the Bulls nor their players were liable for fans getting injured during the game. On the front, a watermark of the stadium as its centerpiece; the Bulls’ mascot on the left edge of the perforation; a handsome red border that set the dull background promoting the event — Chicago Bulls vs. Washington Bullets, Oct. 26, 7:30 p.m — in relief. Those design flairs added to its singular value but weren’t the actual explanation of why it turned out to be the most valuable ticket from a sporting event in history.
The game was the professional debut of a rookie guard from the University of North Carolina, who in a middle-aged man’s recollections had done nothing that night to portend his…
