He's Been Playing His Late Cousin's Lottery Numbers For Years And They Finally Paid Off.

Brian C. of North Ridgeville, Ohio, had been carrying the same five lottery numbers for years, long after the cousin he used to play Keno with had passed away. The original set of three numbers, 11, 22, and 28, was the combination he and his cousin always used when they played together. After his cousin died, Brian added two more to the combination, the numbers 3 and 31, chosen for birthdays that matter to him, and began entering them in the Ohio Lottery's Rolling Cash 5 drawing instead. He has been playing those same five numbers ever since, a quiet ritual that kept something of his cousin present in the small, ordinary moments of everyday life. On June 10th, he bought a ticket at VFW Post 9871 on Lear Nagle Road in his hometown, the kind of unremarkable Tuesday errand that doesn't feel like anything until it is everything.

When Brian checked his ticket and saw that all five numbers had hit, he dropped his phone and started screaming. A coworker who heard him from the next room poked their head in and joked that he must have seen a mouse. He had not seen a mouse. He had won $100,001. Brian told Ohio Lottery officials he plans to use the prize money to pay off some bills and take a vacation to a destination he hasn't quite decided on yet, which seems like exactly the right order of priorities. The Ohio Lottery confirmed the win after he came forward to claim the jackpot. What is not in the press release but is clearly there in the story is the fact that Brian has been playing those numbers for years without winning anything significant, and that he kept playing them anyway because the numbers were never really about winning. They were about his cousin. It just turned out, eventually, that they were about both.

Source:https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2026/06/19/lotto-Ohio-Lottery-old-numbers-cousin/1681781890968/