What began in 1996 as a Japanese designer's childhood memory of collecting insects has grown into one of the most quietly extraordinary cultural phenomena of our time. Pokémon trading cards — 75 billion of them produced and counting — now occupy a space that defies easy categorization: part children's game, part collector's market, part family ritual. In driveways and parking lots, in game rooms and auction houses, something genuinely human is unfolding — a shared obsession that has dissolved, at least temporarily, the usual distance between generations.