I got back into the hobby of collecting cards about a year ago to help pass the time at work. (I'm a firefighter/paramedic at a smaller department and we can sometimes have a lot of downtime) After a few months of going through the cards i had as a kid, i found out my wife was pregnant. This is to be my 2nd child. My first child was a girl so i had no problems finding names i like. However, once finding out i was having a boy, i had a hard time finding any name i remotely liked. I started looking through my cards as i logged them into a spread sheet, paying special attention to names. I came across Owen Nolan. I was always a big fan of Owen as a name and really pushed my wife to name our son this. After watching Grays Anatomy, there is a character on there i can't stand. Owen. (I know, this knocks me down a few pegs on the man ladder but i watched it to make hte wife happy.
Plus, i started to say the name Owen and I couldn't shake the last name Nolan from it, and no offense to anybody named Owen, but it almost sounds like your mouth is full of marbles when you say it a lot. My son was born and we had a list of about 5 names, all of which were a love/hate name. Remembering Owen Nolan, i threw out the name Nolan. (originally this was an instant no) but now for some reason, Nolan had a nice ring to it. After sitting on it a few hours and thinking hard about it, we've decided to name our child Nolan. My wife does not regret the choice at all and neither do i. He looks like a Nolan. So, knowing Owen Nolan had a tie to my son's name, i thought i'd be cool to try and collect a bunch of his cards. Theres a ton of them. A life long project i figured. But than i came across a hockey player named Brandon Nolan. Which i thought was way cooler than Owen Nolan because My first name is Brandon and my son's first name is Nolan. So i instantly changed player collections. In trying to hunt down cards, I found out Brandon Nolan is the son of Ted Nolan. Which is even more crazy because my fathers name is Ted and my middle name is Theodore(Ted). Than, i came across Brandon's profile and saw he was born on July 18th, 1983. I thought that was cool because my son was born on July 15th. Than my wife pointed out that My son and Brandon were both born in the month of July and I was born on November 18th, and she was born in the year 1983. Now i'm not a stalker or crazy person, i'm just an average guy that thought it was pretty cool how all of this tied together without even knowing it. I never bothered to collect players as a personal collection until my son was born. The problem i'm having is he's got a ton of 1/1 cards, mainly from 2008-09 the cup. I've not even been able to locate them.