The one (number) that got away, what it feels like to nearly win the lotto

that moment at which even those who may not usually take an interest in lotteries decide an impending jackpot is too huge to risk not buying a ticket.

Melbourne school teacher Mat Kelly knows all too well how it feels to come so close and yet so far. He and his wife bought a Mega Quickpick in the Saturday night Lotto draw a few years back. The following morning he discovered they had five out of the six numbers needed to win $2 million.“The number we missed out on was my birth date. We were pretty stiff,” he says. Seven years on and the Newport father-of-two still carries a photo of the ticket on his phone.

Tom, a Melbourne father who only wanted to give his first name, has dined out on his near miss at winning $1 million for years. “It was a Saturday afternoon and I just had this really weird feeling that I was going to win Tattslotto. I’d never bought a ticket before and I didn’t have a cent to my name but I knew I had to buy a ticket,” he says.

“They drew the first number, and I said ‘yep, I’ve got the first one, and then sure enough I said ‘yep, I’ve got the second one’ and when I had the third one, my dad sort of looked up and my mum asked if I was joking. Instead of becoming a teenage millionaire he pocketed $1100 and he is not the one person he knows to have got excruciatingly close to the big windfall. The week after one close friend left work, where he had been part of a syndicate, his colleagues each won half a million dollars.

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