I get my Steelers tickets every year from an old high school buddy and was looking forward to going to my first game of the year last Sunday, against the 49ers. I e-mail him Thursday, ask where I can pick up the tickets before the game and he sends me a confused response. "I mailed them to you," he says.

He checks with his assistant and sure enough, she confirms the tickets were sent two weeks ago, along with those to three other home games later in the year. Total cost: $280.

I call my wife at home and ask if she's seen them. No. She searches our mail and bill piles and still can't find them. Now I'm getting really nervous, so I jump on my bike, rush home to the North Side and tear through the whole house looking for them: under the computer, by the bedside table, in the sock drawer, in the trash cans. Still nothing.

My wife, Jen, eight months pregnant, is standing by quietly as I rage around, and as I do it begins to dawn on me what must have happened. Jen is a hard-core recycler and collects every last piece of paper that enters the house -- all junk mail, grocery store circulars, take-out menus, note paper and paper bags -- and the tickets are probably in the trash. But not exactly the trash: instead, the Abitibi recycling Dumpster we go to every couple of weeks on the North Side.

"I'm going to the Dumpster," I say.

I get in my car and drive to the Dumpster, which sits in a church parking lot on Suismon Street. I swing open its two big lids, see that it's full, and start going through all the paper there. Meanwhile, I'm worried about somebody seeing me rifling through all this stuff -- much of it torn-up credit card applications -- and calling the cops on me, so I start talking to a nice old guy who lives next door. Most days, like today, he is sitting outside with his dogs.

I tell him I've lost "an important letter." He says he recognizes me from past trips to the Dumpster and wishes me luck.

Going through this much paper is a major drag -- it's not as disgusting as going through regular trash, but still a chore, since every time you push aside one pile of paper, another one or two piles slide into its place. Still, I find a section of the Dumpster with our ripped-up bills and other stuff, and pluck each paper out one by one. No tickets. I find some more of our stuff and still no tickets. I keep searching, down and down through more and more paper, for 30, maybe 45 minutes with no luck, still in my work clothes, sweating buckets.

I begin to realize that my whole Steelers season is going down the toilet. Not only am I out a ton of cash, but psychically I'm dead too -- every time I see somebody in a Steelers jersey walking joyfully to a game on a Sunday morning (which is often when you live on the North Side), it's going to remind me of the lost tickets, and I won't be able to enjoy a game all year.

I worry if I was a jerk to my poor, suffering wife and whether I was the one who threw away the tickets, not her. I think about the lost money and how it could have been better spent on the baby's college fund. Surely, I think, people have lost their tickets before, in fires or something, and the Steelers have ways of reprinting them -- but it could take forever to get through the red tape, and certainly not by Sunday.

I pick up another old newspaper and sitting there is the envelope, unopened, with my name on it. (My buddy Brett's assistant used a computer address label and it was so professional, it looked like junk mail.) Four pristine Steeler tickets are inside, and I'm hit with waves of both adrenaline and relief, like I've gotten through a car accident unscathed.

I jump down from the Dumpster, go over to the neighbor guy sitting with his dogs and ask him if he wants to see the important thing I was looking for. As I hold out the four tickets, he looks at them and says, "OH MY GOD."