In 1989, my 10-year-old son, Brendan, asked if I would take him and his younger brother Patrick to a trading card show. When I was Brendan’s age, in 1955, I boasted the largest card collection in my Washington neighborhood — hundreds filling two large boxes. The cards in those days were not for collecting. They were for bartering, trading and learning the career statistics of favorite players.

Roaming the card show with two boys hunting for a Michael Jordan rookie card, I was shocked to discover that a 1955 Mickey Mantle card listed for $2,400. I asked a couple of vendors if they had any old Washington Senators cards. They stared back blankly. We were in Year 18 of the exile of Washington baseball from the nation’s capital.

The Senators had left for Texas after the 1971 season, the second team in a little more than a decade to desert Washington. I paused at a table and thumbed through an aged binder. Suddenly, my legs felt weak. Staring up at me through the plastic-sheet protector was the 1952 Topps card of Eddie Yost, hero of my youth, presenter at the Nativity School C.Y.O. awards dinner and longtime Senators third baseman. I turned the card over. On the back was the information we memorized as children: 154 games, .283 batting average, 109 runs.

I thought I was hallucinating. I had spent every penny I had on those Topps cards, which cost a nickel a pack at the drugstore in our Fort Stevens neighborhood. (Fort Stevens was our local monument, the Civil War site where Lincoln came to see the action during one battle and was almost shot.) By the sixth grade, I had a most impressive collection, but I cared only about the cards of my team.