DETROIT – Kevin Ouellette of Pittsfield walked into the Maine Store in Detroit on Friday afternoon just like he always does after work.

“Have you checked your lottery tickets?” clerk Patty Kennedy asked him. Kennedy had already been alerted that a $250,000 ticket in the New Year’s Millionaire Raffle had been sold at the store.

Ouellette, 51, said he went home, picked up his tickets, read off his numbers and nearly fell to his knees. He won with the six-digit number 108613 which the computer had picked for him.

“It’s overwhelming,” Ouellette said several hours later by phone, still reeling from the good news. “My knees buckled and I had to take an aspirin.”

Ouellette owns a small landscaping business and said he will use part of his winnings to upgrade his equipment. The rest, he said, will be put away as a retirement fund.

“I’ve worked hard all my life and had my ups and downs,” he said. “I hope to spend some wisely but put the rest away.”

Several hours after learning he was the winner, Ouellette was still accepting congratulations. “I can’t get off the phone,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”

The Tri-State New Year’s Millionaire Raffle was a special lottery offered from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, 2007. Only 80,000 of the 200,000 tickets were sold in Maine; the rest were offered in New Hampshire and Vermont. There was one winner of $1 million, in New Hampshire, and one $250,000 in each of the three states.

The Maine Store also had a $250 winner.

The store will receive a 1 percent commission for selling the $250,000 ticket. Store employees were gleefully celebrating Friday night.

“He is such a sweet, really nice guy,” Kennedy said. “I’m just so glad that it’s someone from around here.”

Kennedy said that when she learned the store had the winning ticket, she began calling everyone she knew. “We called all our regulars, our employees. When Kevin came in we told him to go check his numbers. He told us, ‘If I win, you know what, girls, I’m coming back and we’re closing up shop. We’re out of here!'”

Meghan Curtis said, “Who knows, I may be going to Aruba in 15 minutes,” as she waited on a customer at about 7:30 p.m.

The Maine Store, owned for the past 20 years by Jim and Penny Basford of Plymouth, is the heart of Detroit. Customers can buy everything from postcards to pizza, work gloves to dish detergent, snowmobile oil to a cake mix. It’s the first place to put out a collection box for a family in need and, on Friday, the first place to begin celebrating.

As customers filed through, many asked about the winning ticket. “Good for him,” they commented.

Ouellette admitted that gambling was one habit that was hard to break and that he went around to all the small general stores where he does business and bought a $20 ticket at each of them. “I bought about a half-dozen,” he said.

“This time, I guess it really paid off,” he said.