The Joy of a Completed Set!

One of my favorite card releases in the last few years was Panini's 2012 Cooperstown set.  I bought a couple boxes, pulled some nice HOF auto and decided to go after the complete set along with quite a few insert sets.  The base set consists of 170 cards and in typical recent fashion, the last 20 were reprints.  The first 150 cards were black and white photos and the 20 short prints were colorized.  I think both photo types look great and really enjoy the set.

The problem has been tracking down the short prints.  These were either super short printed or there is a massive unopened inventory of this set in storage somewhere.  I saw some retail boxes of the product on sale on Black Friday and thought about picking some up in hopes of tracking down the SPs but wisely didn't go through with it.  I hoped that would increase the inventory on the secondary market.

Through my boxes and some eBay and Sportlots pickups I was able to get down to about 4-5 needs to complete my set.  Over the last couple months of last year I did searches everywhere I could think of and picked up all but 1 card.  The Jim Bottomley card #158 was nowhere to be found.  A couple crystal parallels were for sale but the short printed base card wasn't anywhere.

I set up an eBay search and followed it so it would notify me when any new cards got posted for sale.  One or two more parallels came up but for weeks, no card #158.  Then a couple weeks ago one popped up with a 99 cent minimum bid. I quickly put in a high bid of around $10 - I really wanted this card.  Wouldn't you know it but the next day another copy came up with an $8 Buy It Now.  I was torn and almost pulled the trigger and got it but I didn't want to get stuck with 2 copies. I waited patiently for the auction to end and scored this card for $8.02 delivered:

I was worried I would never get this set completed back last year when the want list stood at 4-5 cards.  The SPs weren't plentiful and the few I saw were extremely overpriced.  It is hard to explain how how happy completing this set has made this set collector.

Here are all 20 SPs in order from the set, I wonder how many other crazy collectors completed this thing?

Any fun stories out there on tracking down that final elusive card?