Income from selling sneaker collection. What about inventory?

I’m rephrasing this from an earlier question I posed. I’ve been collecting sneakers for 25 years and have amassed about 3000 pairs. Some were purchased with the intent of selling someday (and in past years I’ve sold a few pairs here and there). I started to sell more in 2022 and I intend to start selling off a large part of the collection in 2023.

I want to report the income on my 2022 taxes and going forward. I had $1500 in gross sales in 2022 with COGS of about $1100.

When I am filling out schedule C it asks if the business was started in 2022 which I’m going to have to answer yes.

Then it asks about inventory—well I’ve got 2500 pairs of sneakers I intend to try to sell in the next 5 years. But 95% of them were acquired prior to 2022. A couple of the pairs I sold last year were quick flips but several were purchased in previous years (I have records).

How would I justify inventory suddenly appearing?