When Michael Jordan levitated over Craig Ehlo 35 years ago today, Andy Hostetler didn't need to see the ball swoosh through the hoop.
"It's over," the die-hard Cleveland sports fan screamed to his father, wife and son, who were all by his side,.
Hostetler's 11-year-old son, Nick, didn't take his father's word for it.
Sitting in Section 206, Row M, the family had the perfect view of the shot, from the corner of the second deck at Richfield Coliseum.
As the building fell quiet to Jordan's buzzer-beater that helped the Chicago Bulls end the Cavaliers' season in 1989, Nick soon wished he had never seen one of the most iconic shots in NBA history.
Despite the anger and another dagger in the side of the Cleveland sports fan — a little more than a year after "The Fumble" robbed the Browns of a Super Bowl trip and two years after John Elway led "The Drive" — there was one thing Andy was going to hold onto: The Tickets.
You see, no matter how good or bad the game was, Andy Hostetler had to save the tickets. It had become so much a part of his life. He had done it since he was a kid.
Only one event he had ever gone to had been proven truly historic: when he was among the 13,400 fans who saw Dennis Eckersley throw a no-hitter at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in May 1977.
And so, despite the painful memory, the tickets made their way to a shoe box in the basement of the Hostetler's house on Spruce Street in Sterling, Ohio.
We'll get back to their fate later.
Ticket collectors who love to collect moments are often obsessed with the chase for rare tickets. How rare a ticket is depends on a variety of circumstances, including where the event happened.
When a great moment happens on the road, the likelihood of tickets surviving become a lot less likely.
And that brings us to May 7.
Two of the greatest moments for the away team happened on a basketball court May 7.
On May 7, 1989, at Cleveland's Richfield Coliseum, Jordan hit his famous shot over Ehlo to send the Cavaliers packing.
On May 7, 1995, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Reggie Miller scored eight points in less than nine seconds to lead the Indiana Pacers to a two-point victory over the Knicks in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Both tickets are extremely rare. PSA has only graded 17 tickets to Jordan-Ehlo and just 10 tickets from Miller's incredible flash of brilliance. One of the ten Miller stubs is currently on eBay for $2,499.
That there are even 17 saved from Richfield is a minor miracle.
If fans in attendance for the Cavs' unforgettable Game 5 loss did save their ticket, the next step would be to remember what the ticket represented.
The season-ticket version only refers to it as "Home Game C." It has no date, no time and no opponent. Then there's the fact it's just computer printing and a small "The Coliseum" logo.
"Back then, the aesthetic of the ticket mattered a ton as to whether you'd want to keep a ticket or not," said Matt Fuller, head of ticket authentication at PSA. "If there was a nice design, you were much more likely to keep it, which explains why so many World Series tickets from the '40s and '50s and Super Bowl tickets later on were saved. But if you had a ticket like this Cavs one, why would you keep it? There was no collectible ticket market to go to at the time."
The tickets sat in the shoebox among meaningless games played by the Indians, Browns, Force, Crunch and LeBron's high school tickets from St. Vincent-St. Mary in Akron ... until the COVID summer of 2020. That's when Nick told Andy the ticket market was heating up and there was some value to what they had saved.
Andy, as well organized as he was, knew what was what, despite no date or opponent to help him. Nick, who ironically had been working for longtime Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf's White Sox, brought the tickets to Heritage.
When they asked if there was a minimum he had hoped to get for the lot of three tickets — one was lost over the years — Nick said he replied "a couple hundred dollars."
On Aug. 30, 2020, the three tickets sold for $11,100.
Although there are only 10 to the Reggie Miller moment, they are way more affordable.
The Jordan-over-Ehlo ticket sells in the $5,000 range, while the Miller can be had in decent condition for $500.
How easily is the Jordan over Ehlo ticket missed?
Andrew Goldberg is known as the Michael Jordan ticket collector.
He has collected tickets from 87 percent of the games MJ played.
He is missing only four playoff games and has three Jordan-over-Ehlo tickets.
Goldberg told cllct that in December 2019, he saw an eBay listing:
"3 - NBA Tikct Stubs - Pistons vs. Clippers (1990) + Cleveland Playoff (1989)"
The Cleveland playoff game happened to be Jordan- Ehlo.
He was the only bidder.
“I won it for $1, plus 60 cents shipping,” Goldberg said.
Nick Hostetler still cringes when thinking about Jordan's famous shot, but the feeling has gotten a little bit better knowing that 31 years after the game, his family earned a five-figured profit for the complimentary tickets they got from his dad's company.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectible market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.