Patience pays again. The original pool was 5 that pitched in $2 per week for 5 years. Two of the guys dropped out in the last year leaving 3 men to win and split the $26m lottery prize. What was their number system? Choosing sport legends and playing their numbers. The three men walk with $3.6 each and say they won't change much and continue to work. This is a great story reported by Syracuse's website. There is a great video with it as well, so just search the headline to see it.

Five years of pooling $10 each week for lottery tickets pays off for New Process Gear co-workers

DeWitt, NY -- Freddie Hands, Douglas Tedford and Ronald Edwards plan to keep working at New Process Gear until the DeWitt automotive factory closes — despite the fact that all three are about to become millionaires.

Their five years of pooling money to buy $10 in Mega Millions lottery tickets each week paid off June 22 when lottery officials drew their numbers. The trio held the only winning ticket on a jackpot potentially worth $26 million.

Thursday, lottery officials introduced the men at an 11 a.m. presentation at the Price Chopper supermarket at Erie Boulevard East and South Midler Avenue, in Syracuse. That’s where Hands, the customary ticket buyer for the group, purchased the winning ducat.

“Don’t let it change you,” a well-wisher called out as reporters gathered around the winners.

“It won’t,” Hands assured him.

“The only thing it will change is retirement,” Tedford said. “I don’t think it’s going to be right away,” the 44-year-old Canastota resident added. “I mean, we’ve got a lot of planning to do. We’re still working at the plant. We’ve decided that we’re going to stay and pretty much ride the plan out. My plans are to invest the money and just gonna wait and see what happens in the future (and) take care of my kids.”

The windfall comes as Magna International, New Process Gear’s owner, winds down operations at the factory toward an undetermined closing date.

The money they won is less than the jackpot size might indicate. When he bought the ticket, Hands opted to take any winnings in a lump sum, rather than in payments over time. The lump-sum payoff was $16.9 million. Split three ways, that’s about $5.6 million before taxes, about $3.7 million after, state Lottery spokeswoman Carolyn Hapeman said.

Edwards, 47, of Syracuse, said he planned to go back to college and complete a degree in biology.

Hands, 55, also of Syracuse, said he planned to tithe 10 percent of his winnings to his church and buy a new car for his wife to replace her 11-year-old Plymouth Breeze.

Winning that amount of cash has the potential to be life-changing, Hands said. “But you know what? My thing is, you have to still remain humble,” Hands said. “As long as you do that, everything else will take care of itself.’’

The trio were among five co-workers who originally began buying Mega Millions tickets together, Hapeman said.

Frank Quattrone said he was one of them, but stopped pitching in about a year ago when he transferred to another department. The other member dropped out about two weeks ago, he said.

Rumors ran rampant at the plant last week that Hands and two others had won the $26 million, Quattrone said. Some people thought he was still part of the group. “People have been calling me saying ‘Did you win? Did you win?’ Nah, I dropped out. I wish I hadn’t,” he said.

The group typically never won more than a couple of dollars, which they plowed back into tickets. Each member had their own pet numbers, and it was Hands’ — 12, 17, 21, 23, 30 and Mega Ball 24 — that did the trick. Those were the jersey numbers, respectively, of sports legends Roger Staubach, John Havlicek, Dave Bing, Michael Jordan, Terrell Davis and Sam Jones, Hands said.

Hands said the numbers looked familiar when he saw them the next day in The Post-Standard. “Then I went and got the card that I had, and looked at that and went one by one. Then I said, let me check it, it might be a misprint,” he said. “OK, so I went to my computer, then I looked it up again. And once I saw that, I said, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’”

He went to the plant and told Tedford.

“I thought he was joking at first,” Tedford said. He held off telling anyone, he said, until he could break the news to Edwards. “I got no reaction from Ron. He was pretty calm and cool about the whole thing,” he said.

The co-workers frequently had talked about what they would do with the money if they ever hit it big, Tedford said — “Vacation, buy this, buy that and all that.” The reality, he said, is “a lot of planning to figure out what to do — to do the right thing with it.”