When I was a little kid — this would have been the late 1970s, possibly early 1980s — I owned a cup that looked like an ice cream cone. The bottom part of the cup looked like a cone. The “lid” looked like a scoop of ice cream. The plastic ice cream was covered with a removable brown piece of plastic that looked like melted chocolate. There was a hole to accommodate a straw. We owned two of these cups. Mine had a scoop of vanilla on top; my sister’s was mint green.

I don’t remember where they came from or what happened to them, but approximately a decade ago, I decided I wanted to own them again.

And. Here. We. Go.

If you search Google Images for ‘ice cream cone cups’ you’ll find thousands of ice cream cone cups of all shapes and sizes. There are plastic ones and ceramic ones of every color. There are also thousands of pictures of real ice cream cones, plastic bowls for eating ice cream, cupcakes and plastic banks that look like ice cream cones, and all kinds of things that aren’t ice cream cone cups. For ten years, I have been searching Google and Google Images for pictures of the cup I used to own.

I searched Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, and other similar sites for ice cream cone cups. I also set up automated tools to monitor websites for ice cream cone cups, and combined my searches with words like “retro” and “vintage”.

Two years ago, I finally found a picture of one.

This picture came from an Etsy reseller, and by the time I discovered the image, the cup had already been sold. I offered the seller a hundred bucks just to tell me who bought it, so I could offer them another hundred for the stupid cup, but no dice. Dead end.

Each year, I hit up my online army of friends to remind them that I’m looking for the cup. Occasionally I get “I remember those!” and “I had one of those!” but it hasn’t turned up any leads.

Until this year.

This year, Twitter pal GabeDiGennaro asked, “was this a Disney cup?” Mine wasn’t, but then he shared a picture that put me on the right track.

It’s the cup. It’s the same exact cup — well, almost, but with a Disney label attached. I tracked the image to an eBay auction… that had just ended. I contacted the seller and discovered that although the auction had ended, the cup hadn’t sold. A deal was quickly arranged and… well, I think we all know how this story ends, don’t we?

The only difference between this cup and the one I owned as a kid are those Disney characters, and I’m debating whether or not to remove them. I still haven’t tracked down the source of the original cup — we’re leaning toward Tupperware, although Avon is a possibility, too.

I have found at least one other color combination — a strawberry on strawberry combination that also appeared on eBay, which tells me there are more of these out there.

And while the strawberry one is interesting, and I wouldn’t mind owning a mint green one, I’m pretty darn happy with the one I got. After a decade of searching, this plastic cone is sweeter than any ice cream could ever be.