You Can’t Win If You Don’t Obssessively Fork Over $42 Each Week

And over the course of 30 years, that comes out to $65,520. Then again, they did win twice in 11 years*. Just don’t tell the poor saps you see each Friday down at the lottery bodega:

Lottery lightning has struck twice for a former Bronx couple, who won the state lottery for the second time in 11 years.

“It’s a great feeling,” Eugene Angelo Sr., 81, said yesterday when he learned that the ticket he bought with wife Adeline, 74, last week was the sole winner in the twice-weekly Lotto game and is worth $5 million.

In December 1996, the family bought one of four winning jackpot tickets and received the lump-sum payout of $2.5 million after sharing a $10 million jackpot with three others.

“We’re a little older, a little wiser, and there are a few more of us when you count the grandkids,” said Angelo, a retired construction worker who sold his Bronx home and moved to Mahopac in Putnam County after winning the lottery the first time.

“But we’re still the same old people. Still very excited.”

Eugene Jr. said his father spends about $42 on lottery tickets each week — and has done so since the state lottery began nearly 30 years ago.

. . .

The chances of winning once are 22 million to 1 — so the odds of doing it two times are “galactically astronomical,” said New York Lottery spokesman John Charlson.

Acting Lottery Director Gardner Gurney said the Angelos are “living proof that lightning, or in this case, random luck, can strike twice.”