The most coveted and precious possession is a small, dressed up piece of paper that will get you through the gates at Ford Field, and into Super Bowl XL on Feb. 5. The game belongs to Detroit this year, but the tickets do not.

As the host team for the event, the Lions have access to about five percent of the seats for the game. The team held on to some for its use, and made the rest - about 2,700 tickets - available to Lions season-ticket holders via a lottery. A spokesman for the Lions confirmed that every season-ticket holder had a chance to be part of the lottery, but the format was weighted to give those with the most seniority the best chance at landing Super Bowl tickets.

"We got a letter saying we were supposedly in a lottery, but the rumor I heard was that the season-ticket holders who had been around the longest were the only ones who got tickets," said Tony Gill, the assistant general manager for the Storm hockey team and a Lions season-ticket holder since 2001.

"What irritated me the most was, they sent you a letter saying they held the lottery and you didn't get tickets, and then they proceeded to tell you about all of the other stuff going on, and they wanted you to buy tickets to all of that," Gill said. "I'm a football fan, and I want to go to the game."

The league wraps a heavy cloak of secrecy over its procedure for handling Super Bowl tickets, and keeps a large block of tickets for its sponsors and a lengthy list of VIPs. The league made 500 pairs of tickets available to the general public through a lottery on its Web site - at a face value of $600 and $700 - but the deadline to enter that drawing was way back on June 1.

With so few tickets flowing on the open market, prices have blasted through the roof of Ford Field, and brokers are demanding and receiving four or five times the face value two weeks before the game takes place. Tickets for the first Super Bowl in 1967 were $6, $10 and $12. More>>>

SUPER BOWL TICKETS

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