They say you can't put a price on history. The owners of Philadelphia's venerable Spectrum would disagree. Comcast-Spectactor, owners of the 76ers and Flyers, attempted to auction off the famous panels of court on which Christian Laettner hit his famous shot over Kentucky in the 1992 NCAA Tournament East Regional final. But when an eBay auction failed to reach a pre-determined minimum, the bidding ended with no winner.

There were nine panels of flooring up for sale that, when assembled, measured out to a 24x12 section of the free throw area from the Laettner miracle. You may have seen this clip once or twice:

Those pieces went up for sale on eBay earlier this month. The starting price was $2,500 and a reserve price was set to ensure that the item went for an amount that Comcast-Spectactor deemed worthy. Embarrassingly though, only one bid was made, and it was for the minimum amount. Thus, the auction closed Thursday with no winner. (The reserve price is unknown, but it was clearly more than $2,500, which is right around the same amount of money that Comcast charges me for cable and Internet every month.)

This auction was probably a failure of marketing and imagination. These are lean economic times, but $2,500 doesn't seem like too much money to own a piece of one of the most famous sporting moments of the last 25 years. Surely there had to be a Duke grad willing to throw down some money on the court, if not to put in his or her own house, then to donate to the school. The University of Maryland, for instance, has a large section of the court from the school's 2002 national title on display at the Comcast Center.

If the Remember the Spectrum group had been able to spread the word a little more about the auction, it might have been more successful. That it took the great eBay hunter, David Arnott (from The Sporting News' First Cuts), until after the bidding was over to find this auction on eBay says a lot about how hard it was to find.