About a month ago I was wandering around a sports memorabilia store, PSGameGear, in the Dulles Mall. I got bored and found myself at the front of the store where the football cards are at. I hadn't opened a pack since I was a kid, so I thought it would be fun if I could pull my own card. I bought about 10 and let the opening begin. Ten minutes and $70 later I was out of luck -- no Cooley cards! I was a little disappointed, but in that 10 minutes I'd become addicted to a hobby that consumed my life as a 12 year-old.

In the sixth grade I put together a string of cash flow opportunities. I would mow anybody's lawn or shovel any driveway of snow. I became a master of the used golf ball business. I could find a lost ball anywhere on any course, and then I would clean it up and start selling. I was taking in about $100 a month and every penny of it went to trading cards.

I collected hundreds of thousands of cards. It didn't matter what the sport was; I wanted the best. The card shop was a three-mile bike ride away, one that I made close to every day for over two years. I would buy packs, boxes, singles, rookies ... you name it. It all made me so happy.

After opening the 10 packs the other day at PSGameGear I learned that football cards are way cooler than when I was a kid. There are autographed cards, jersey cards and all different kinds of numbered cards. I got an Adrian Peterson autographed rookie card listed 62 out of 199! On eBay it's going for over $300. I have never gotten a card worth close to that much money, and after returning home all I wanted to do was open more packs.

My wife and I returned to the store about a week later, and we bought three boxes of different cards. We spent over two hours opening packs and delightfully organizing cards, and, to my surprise, she was hooked too. We got all kinds of great cards. A Darren McFadden jersey card was supposedly the highest in value, but our biggest excitement was scoring three different Cooley cards.

If I had known as a kid I could have done that, I would have gone crazy. As a card collector, that's the greatest thing. We also bought enough cards ($275 worth, about what I would spend in three months as a kid) to collect the entire set of 2008 Playoff Prestige.

At home with hundreds of cards, we decided that it would be fun to create our own account on eBay and sell them. We tried to take great pictures and then describe the cards. Christy wants to describe every card as beautiful. I don't know if that's a great way to describe a card, but it seems catchy enough. 

We have our first cards listed for sale and three of them have bids already. I'm pretty sure we'll spend way more money buying cards than we'll ever make on them, but we've had a blast giving it a try.

Chris Cooley is a Pro Bowl tight end for the Washington Redskins and blogs every Wednesday here on Shutdown Corner. Read more from Cooley on his personal blog, where he gets awesome all the time.

Related: The Cooley Zone