During ages 5-7, 1984 - 1985 I loved the baseball and football cards my dad brought home for me. But it wasn't until the fall of '86 that I started "collecting" (before that I played with the cards, wrote on the backs, and stored them in a 1972 Olympics bag that my aunt gave me. I was just thinking the other day how the 1987 Topps set was the first set I remember waiting for the release and being excited about the new design. The wood panelling often gets panned, but I will always love it.
I stopped collecting baseball cards when MLB went on strike. I collected basketball and mostly hockey cards for a couple more years, but I moved into comic books almost exclusively and was pretty much done with both by the time I graduated from high school. It was a good long run, ages 5-17 broadly speaking, or ages 7-15 as prime collecting years.
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