You'd have to ask
@Rob and I have no idea.
I have no idea if our beloved admin, benevolent dictator if you will, cares to share the story.
I too would like to know the story. You can do quite a bit of digging with the Wayback Machine at archive.org if you want.
You can also do some DNS dives, to see this WHOIS history of the domain - but those can be inaccurate, though they're often valuable for deciding this.
Our admin may simply opt to not share.
What I will say, and this is partially for
@Rob's benefit (but I'm sure he knows) is that this domain ranks VERY well with search engines and this domain is VERY valuable. If he sold this domain, I'd expect somewhere in the range of six figures, but an auction could make it go even higher - that is well into the six figure range.
All I know is that it was an extremely fortunate domain name purchase by someone.
I'd lowball a five figure offer just 'cause I'm cheap. I'd immediately start flipping it, 'cause I sure as heck don't want to be the head admin here.
Why? Do you want to buy it? LOL
But, really, I don't know. I don't know if anyone knows other than Rob.
This post will ping him, but don't forget that this could be personal information and they may not want to answer the question. We're all entitled to agency and to privacy.