The late ’90s was a time when cellphones were big and dreams of plush payday were bigger.

On Christmas Eve 1997, Maple the Beanie Baby was one of the hottest toys in Toronto, capping off a year where the popular critters sold out soon after shipments arrived, a combination of speculative collecting and pure childhood glee.

That summer, 10-year-old Mike Garard was featured in the Star, draped in Beanie Babies on the family front lawn.

“Not short of business savvy, when he realized the prices some could command, he started keeping the manufacturer’s tags on,” the story noted.

Now, 15 years later, Garard is grown up, and some of those rare Beanies once worth thousands, well, “You can’t even get 20 bucks,” he says.

The Internet — in its infancy at the outset of the craze, is now a graveyard of discontinued fan websites and online classifieds, advertising entire collections for sale.

Nicole Tersigni, 21, posted on Craigslist that her collection of 52 Beanie Babies, at $400 “would make a great Christmas or birthday gift for a young child or collector.” It’s been around six weeks: Wiggly the octopus, Cheeks the baboon and friends are still languishing online.

“Now I can’t seem to unload them because everyone already has a bunch they want to sell themselves,” she wrote in an email.

In the mid to late ’90s, Ty marketed the animals at a child-friendly price point — $10 to $15. The company targeted specialty stores, named each animal, and eventually “retired” them, cutting supply to make them more valuable.

The ’90s were booming with increased incomes and a revived stock market, said Anthony Kalamut, chair of Seneca’s creative advertising program. There was also a lot of “guilt money” from parents who were working longer hours and were happy to make purchases and be “part of the chase,” he said.

While Ty still produces Beanie Babies, gone are the days when adults counted on thousand dollar payouts in the resale market.

“It was almost like playing the lottery. Five dollars for a Beanie that could end up worth much, much more,” U.S. collector Leon Schlossberg wrote in an email. “Economic common sense refuted that logic but there is no stopping the human compulsion to gamble.”

Jim Silver, editor in chief of timetoplaymag.com, said the craze ended with the rise of more web-based toys like Neopets and Webkinz.

“Very few things last forever in the toy business outside of Barbie and Lego and board games,” he said.

Schlossberg, who runs the website Tycollector.com with his daughter, Sondra, said the “bottom dropped out” around 2000. With lots of plush on the market, the high-stakes buyers disappeared, not convinced of resale values.

“The market settled down and Beanie Babies turned into what Ty had envisioned all along: an inexpensive toy animal or doll that a child could buy with his or her allowance money,” he wrote, estimating that values have declined by 70 to 80 per cent, with a few exceptions.

Current economic conditions mean more people are liquidating their collections.

“It is not unusual to see large collections being sold for an average of 40 cents per Beanie Baby,” he wrote.

At the height of the craze, Garard’s father told him to sell the animals, but he couldn’t part with them. He estimated he had four or five of the rare ones worth $7,500 to $10,000.

When high school came, he hid them away. “It’s not the most impressive thing if you’ve got a girlfriend coming over and you’ve got a ton of stuffed animals all over the place,” Garard said, laughing.

He brought them out to take a look on Monday at the family home, where you’ll find 29 Christmas trees, dozens of nutcrackers and a seemingly complete ceramic Christmas village. (Collecting runs in the blood.)

Garard tried to sell the collection online a few years ago, but realized they were worth very little. As he surveyed the menagerie of creatures splayed out on the pool table, he didn’t know what he’ll do with them. Likely nothing.

“We’re hoping that Mike has kids one day,” his dad, David, said with a laugh, later adding: “Can you close the article with, ‘Any offer accepted?’ ”