Who better to win the country’s biggest lottery prize than eight meatpackers from the heartland of America?

Now those are the kind of people we can relate to and cheer for. The winners appear to be decent, hard-working types, most of them putting in from 60 to 70 hours a week at the Lincoln, Neb., meat plant. Three are immigrants – two who left Vietnam about 16 years ago and another who fled civil unrest in the Congo in 1999.

“This is a great country,” one said through tears of gratitude.

Ain’t it, though?

The last I read of the lucky eight, each of whom gets a $15.5 million after-tax cut of the $365 million prize, five plan to keep their jobs packing ham and corned beef on the swing and graveyard shifts. They vow to not let their riches change who they are, by which they mean regular folks like you and me.

Right on, you millionaire meatpackers! By making the extraordinarily improbable seem possible, you give hope to average people everywhere who stand in line at convenience stores while fantasizing about buying that one ticket that will finance all their dreams. So continued good luck, humble Cornhuskers, as you pursue your lives of ease and luxury.

According to the money-management experts, you’re going to need all the luck you can get.

It turns out that people who never had a pile of money before often lack the financial acumen and common sense to handle sudden windfalls, and lottery lore is littered with accounts of people for whom winning the big one was a dream that turned into a nightmare.

“I won the American dream, but I lost it, too,” a New Jersey woman said in an MSN.com story about several people who won the lottery and wish they hadn’t.

The woman, who won $5.4 million, gave it away to anyone who put his hand out and dropped a big chunk of the rest into slot machines. She now has nothing and lives in a trailer.

Then there’s the machinist who won $1 million in Michigan and moved to California to go into the car business with his brothers. Within five years he had filed for bankruptcy and is now working as a machinist again. One man in Lansing, Mich., according to MSN.com, won $3.1 million in 1989. Two years later he was broke, having spent his money on crack cocaine and a divorce settlement, and was facing a murder charge.

A woman in Missouri won $18 million in 1993 and, by being exceptionally generous to a variety of political, educational and community causes over the next eight years, had to file for bankruptcy with only $700 in her bank account. A couple in the Southeast who won $4.2 million, the story said, watched all of their dough disappear into a huge house, several cars and the pockets of begging relatives. Now broke and divorced, she lives in a small house and he moved in with the kids.

And who can forget William “Bud” Post, the most luckless of lottery legends? After winning $16.2 million in 1988, a former girlfriend successfully sued him for a share, his brother hired a hit man to kill him, and his other siblings talked him into investing in businesses that soon flopped. He now lives on $450 a month and food stamps.

“I wish it never happened,” Post said. “It was totally a nightmare.”

Maybe those eight meatpackers should keep their jobs after all – minus the overtime, of course.