Hey, kids! Want to retire early? Well, never mind studying hard and saving those pennies and dimes. Just hold on tight to your childhood ephemera -- like trading cards and such -- and maybe by the time you're ready to start auctioning off your belongings, one of your old favorites will be worth a small fortune.

Case in point: The Holy Grail of baseball cards, the legendary 1909 Honus "The Flying Ducthman" Wagner -- a card once owned by Wayne Gretzky, among others -- sold the other day for $2.35 million, almost twice what the seller paid for it six years ago.

There are only 60 or so of the Wagner cards in existence -- presumably because the famously clean-living Honus eventually refused to allow the American Tobacco Co. to bundle his image as a "tobacco card" with their cigarettes.

The card that sold the other day is considered in the best shape of all the 1909 cards left on the planet -- although as the seller, Brian Siegel, CEO of an asset management company called Emerald Capital LLC, put it: "You could stick [any of the Honus cards] in the middle of the street and let cars drive over it through the day, take it in your hand and crumple it up, and it still would be a $100,000 card."

The buyer, meanwhile, is an "unnamed Orange County businessman" -- an appellation that we're hoping, really hoping, is not some sort of code for Charlie Sheen.

Now, if only we could find that Al Hrabosky card we put away in the attic 30 years ago. Hey, if The Flying Dutchman can pull in a cool 2 mil, who's to say what sort of bidding frenzy The Mad Hungarian's rookie card might generate?

--BEN COSGROVE