On the day Dan Hughes unwrapped the package in the Sunflower Bike and Outdoor Shop, a handful of customers treated the contents as if they were the Shroud of Turin, the flag from the World Trade Center and a Mickey Mantle baseball card.

Others, however, thought someone had pulled a practical joke by sending Hughes a parcel of dirty laundry.

Inside were the socks, shoe covers, shorts and race number U.S. cyclist George Hincapie had worn in the Paris-Roubaix, a torturous 161-mile bicycle race contested on April 14 in the wretched mud, rain and cobblestones of Northern France.

“When we unpacked them,” Hughes said, “they were still wet and they still had mud on them. They were stinkin’ a little bit. Some of the people in the shop wondered what was going on, but there were some who were in awe of these holy relics.”

Holy relics indeed.

After Lance Armstrong, Hincapie is arguably this country’s best known cyclist. An Armstrong teammate, New Yorker Hincapie topped the U.S. contingent in the nearly seven-hour Paris-Roubaix by finishing sixth.

Thus, anything Hincapie wore in the race would be held in reverence by cycling aficionados, and that most certainly includes Hughes, who collects such memorabilia and has ever since a fire destroyed the original Sunflower Bike and Outdoor Shop a few years ago.

“Ever since we rebuilt after the fire we’ve wanted it to be as much of a bicycle museum as retail space,” Hughes said.

Sunflower’s showcase item has been a pre-Tour de France jersey worn by Armstrong. If it had been donned by Armstrong in cycling’s most famous race, it would be worth thousands of dollars.

“The price of a jersey has gone up so much,” Hughes said. “One of Armstrong’s was auctioned for $10,000 on eBay recently.”

When Hughes wrote Hincapie and asked for some of the items he had worn in the Paris-Roubaix, Hughes didn’t bother to ask for the jersey.

“I told him to auction it off, that there was no way we could afford it,” Hughes said. “What I asked for were his socks, and the reason I did is because my socks always tell a story after I race. They’re muddy and they’re bloody.”

Lo and behold, Hincapie sent the socks and, as a bonus, the shoe covers, shorts and race number as well.

“It was kind of like a lottery winning for us,” Hughes said.

Yes, but you don’t have to fumigate lottery tickets.

Hughes wanted to display Hincapie’s artifacts in their post-race condition so he dried them, of course, then took the extra step to make sure they were hygienically immaculate by sending them to the KU Museum of Natural History, where they were placed in a freezer to kill the bacteria.

After a week in the museum’s deep freeze, the articles were returned to the Sunflower Bike and Outdoor Shop on Saturday and will eventually be framed and hung in a place of reverence on a shop wall, or perhaps in a two-sided Plexiglas frame hanging from the ceiling.

“To have something that was actually worn by America’s foremost Classics racer is unbelievable,” Hughes said.