Can anyone identify this plant?

It is a Liquidambar Styraciflua seedling. In other words, it is the seedling of one of those really large tree that drops the "spiky balls" that are incredibly, horrendously, astoundingly painful when you are taking out the trash in bare feet at about 1am.

It is dead and gone.

Thank you to Adam Vandenberg's ecology grad-student girlfriend. While we aren't south of the Mason-Dixon line, that particular kind of tree (or one in the same family) is extremely common around here. We used to have one growing in front of the house, but it was removed a while ago. Apparently, one of the bloody annoying little spiky seed pods lived on.

That was fun. I will certainly keep an eye out for other random plants that need identification.