MALONE — Talk about an early Christmas present.

On Dec. 18, Jami Devins claimed the $5 million top prize in the New York Lottery’s “Set For Life” scratch-off game. The actual value of that is $2,294,124, after the required tax withholdings, according to the New York Lottery.

There are two options for how jackpot winners can collect their money. In this case, NY Lottery stated that Devins, of Saranac, opted to take the one-time lump-sum payment over the drawn-out annuity option.

The annuity, instead, pays out a guaranteed $5 million over weekly installments. That means if a winner were to die before the pre-tax $5 million is paid out, the remainder would be paid to their estate. If the winner were to live beyond the $5 million minimum, the scheduled payments would continue in excess of the minimum until they die.

The Enterprise’s attempt to reach Devins by press time Sunday was unsuccessful.

The jackpot was sold at the Parkway Express Valero Gas Station, located at 3385 U.S. Route 11 in Malone. Sharon Scarafone has worked there for over two years, and sold the winning ticket. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the odds, Scarafone said she couldn’t recall a transaction remotely close in its significance there. She said she was elated and a bit taken aback when she first found out that the store had sold a multi-million dollar lottery ticket.

“I was very happy for them,” Scarafone said. “Very happy.”

The odds of winning the top prize in “Set For Life” are astronomically minuscule, to say the least. Just how much? According to the NY Lottery, the chance of claiming the top prize in that particular game stands at 1 in 8,019,625. For reference, the odds of being struck by lightning in the U.S. are roughly 1.2 million each year, increasing to about 1 in 15,000 over an 80-year life span.

There were only a total of six jackpot prizes issued when the game “began,” or when the entire batch of scratch-off tickets was printed. With Devin’s big win, four of those six top prizes remain statewide.

There are 10 other prize levels for this game beneath the jackpot. Those include $50,000, $5,000, $1,000, $500, $100, $50, $25, $20, $15 and $10 — with odds ranging from one in 2,405,587.5 for the second-tier prize to one in 10.87 for the lowest level amount. The ticket costs $10 to purchase.

The mechanics of winning are similar to those of other scratch-off games. In this case, revealing a “Life” symbol underneath a number that matched any of the ticket’s six “winning numbers” was what was needed to seal the deal — easier said than done.