Night Owl Cards

I am trying to keep these Brush With Greatness posts to baseball while there are still some baseball players left to feature. But I will make an exception for this one card. First, the card was sent to me by Ben of Cardboard Icons . It's fancy, shiny, over-the-top, all of that, and it must be recognized. Secondly, it's a card of a player that I covered when he was in high school. And to see him on a trading card -- even though he is entering his fourth season in the NFL -- still blows my mind. Brian Leonard was just a goofy kid from a school that sits literally in the middle of nowhere. The school is located in a town built along a single road. There are several stoplights along the way, but if you leave the main road and travel to the left or the right, you are in countryside in less than 5 minutes. The town is in the largest county east of the Mississippi River. It's very sparsely populated, on the northern edge of the Adirondack Mountains. Most of the high schoo...