I have a sorta' relevant story that is somewhat inline with this OP's sentiment. I collected as a kid in the 80's and 90's and like many, I bailed during the junk wax bust. I hadn't even thought about collecting for over a decade, but one day I was at a local shopping mall and a card dealer had some tables set up near the kiosks. Nothing fancy at all. No signage, just some collapsible plastic tables. I believe this was around 2005/2006.
Anyway, the guy had some pretty nice looking ungraded pre-junk cards, mid 70's to early 80's, mostly baseball. At the time, I still didn't know much about grading, and I certainly had no idea what could be found on ebay by then. I came across a few that looked real nice, and ended up buying a Topps Wade Boggs rookie, a Topps Don Mattingly rookie, and a 2nd year Topps Rickey Henderson card. He had each card priced at $15 to $25, and I had no idea what the current values were at the time. All I could remember was that some of those cards had been $50 / $80 / $100+ cards during my childhood collecting years. I think I "bargained" with the guy a little, and got him down to around $50 for all three cards. To my untrained eye, they appeared Mint or very close to Mint.
Fast forward about 4 or 5 years after that, when I had started getting into buying a few cards on Ebay and had educated myself a bit more on grading. I went back to my old box of cards and re-inspected those "great finds" from that one day at the mall. Turned out, they were actually closer to NM condition due to centering and minor corner wear. A couple of the borders on the Mattingly card looked a bit too thin as well. So to my dismay, I had actually paid top dollar for some NM cards, and one that was very likely trimmed. Then my photographic memory recalled the smug double-chin grin on that dealer's face when I was buying those cards, wondering why he was so happy when I was the one scoring such a bargain. HA!
Such are the lessons of trial and error in a hobby full of lowlife clowns. Live and learn.
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