This object reports the OSPF cost metric that this router advertises for the sham link, the value used in SPF calculations to determine whether traffic between the two sites should actually prefer this masked backdoor path or the real backbone-transit path the sham link is designed to suppress. It matters because setting this metric too low can inadvertently make the sham link, a purely local backdoor connection, look more attractive to OSPF than intended, pulling transit traffic across it when that was not the design goal. An admin deliberately configuring a high metric value here ensures OSPF still prefers the primary backbone-transit path and only falls back to the sham link's underlying backdoor connection if that primary path fails.