GILLETTE — Beckett Ganske’s football card of retired running back David Johnson is one of only 49 ever made with a piece of Johnson’s Arizona Cardinals jersey enshrined inside it.

In its protective plastic case, the card — 2.5 by 3.5 inches — has the perfect weight to it. The jersey patch includes most of the Cardinal’s eye and beak, and if you hold it at a certain angle, an iridescent streak lights up Johnson’s face.

Beckett, 13, found it in a park near his house a few weeks ago. Sure it was hidden there for him to find, but it’s still a better story than buying it at Walmart.

“It (was) kind of fun to hunt for them, the challenge,” Beckett said. “I like to hunt and fish and stuff.”

A few weeks ago, Brennan Brinda, 22, along with his girlfriend Lena Wilson, 20, hid two specially-tailored decks of cards for Beckett and his 9-year-old brother Camden in a park-wide scavenger hunt.

This was the second scavenger hunt Brinda had put together that day.

The first, orchestrated that morning in downtown Gillette, was announced on Facebook for anyone to join. Brinda said the downtown Gillette hunt, though it needs a little troubleshooting, was the first of many he planned to put together for kids in the area.

Brinda’s collection of sports cards is somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000. He can easily select the right cards for the occasion from the thousands stored in “boxes and boxes and smaller boxes stacked on bigger boxes” at his apartment, as Wilson put it. Most of them were just recently moved into his dad’s storage unit, after his dog knocked over a sizable stack in the living room.

In the Facebook post, Brinda asked that anyone who found one of the six card packs post a picture. That part didn’t really work out, and it wasn’t for the participants’ lack of enthusiasm. That morning, Beckett and Camden had begged their mom, Nikki Ganske, to take them downtown as soon as possible.

“They were really excited going downtown, they were like ‘Drive, mom, drive,’” Nikki said. “Anything we can do to get them outside and doing something is great.”

After a little while, it became clear to Nikki that the cards had all been found, even though no one had posted a photo. Nikki said she reached out to Brinda to tell him that the cards had all been taken. To Brinda, it just didn’t seem right two genuine sports card enthusiasts should go home empty-handed.

For 20 minutes that evening, the hunt was on at Lakeland Hills Park, and the spoils were pretty neat.

Why sports cards?

Wilson said she doesn’t really get the sports card thing, even though she enjoys helping Brinda set up the scavenger hunts.

“I support it 100%. The little ones’ faces light up, opening a pack of cards,” Wilson said. “(But) I don’t understand the obsession with the cards, and I probably never will.”

Finding cards that honor a player with personal significance is a big part of the hobby’s appeal, Brinda said. He collects cards featuring Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, who played college football for the University of Wyoming.

Collecting the high value cards — cards with a jersey patch inside them, or a player’s autograph — is also a draw. When you buy a card collection from someone, as Brinda will do sometimes through Facebook, there’s always the possibility of finding a rare or valuable card buried in the haystack.

Brinda started the Facebook page for the scavenger hunts, Cards 4 Kids, after buying four big boxes of cards from a private seller. It proved to be too time-consuming a task to hunt through every card in each box, and he was unsuccessful trying to re-sell them online.

“I said, ‘Well, maybe I can give back to the community, make them into little packs and hide them around,’” Brinda said. “I wanted it to be something for families to enjoy.”

He tries to make sure that the people joining the group, which is currently private, actually have kids. This is a problem that has plagued the world of sports card collection intermittently for the past several years: adult collectible card enthusiasts will sometimes buy cards only to resell them at an upcharge, or package them into bulk “mystery” lots.

By cordoning off the activity so that kids, specifically, can enjoy finding the cards, the cards’ monetary value becomes irrelevant. Ideally, what’s left is the love for the cards themselves. But even with profit incentive taken out of the equation, card hunting can get addictive quickly.

“It was kind of like an addiction more than anything,” Brinda said. “It’s kind of like gambling, almost.”

Brinda himself was hooked on sports cards at an early age. He remembers his grandma buying him his first pack from Shopko in Lander when he was 5 or 6. When asked what made his first encounter with sports cards special, it’s difficult for him to say.

“I think it was probably just her sharing interest in something,” Brinda said.

These days, Brinda likes opening card packs with his own kids. Brinda and Wilson’s two daughters, 3-year-old Lily Brinda and 4-year-old Rose Brinda, seem to be into it, he said.

“Every time we go to the store, they ask if we can buy a box of cards,” Brinda said. “They enjoy going through them.”

If Brinda’s history is anything to go by, Lily and Rose might have their own collections in a few years.  How they’ll get rid of them is another story.