I hope you won.

Seriously.

I’m nearly certain you didn’t win and absolutely positive I didn’t, since I didn’t buy any tickets, but I think it would be great if you’re reading this while you’re holding onto the golden lottery ticket.

Whether or not you bought tickets for Saturday’s Powerball lottery drawing, the chances are great that you had heard about it. The top prize — which is a function of the number of tickets sold across 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands — was expected to reach $900 million, according to officials from the Virginia Lottery.

Lottery officials were increasing their estimate by $100 million a day late this week, as people flooded stores across the nation, waving $20 and $100 bills at harried cashiers. In a press release at lunchtime on Saturday, the Virginia Lottery stated that tickets were being sold at a rate of 13,800 per minute across the commonwealth.

By the 10 p.m. cutoff time for purchasing tickets on Saturday, odds are good the prize will have reached $1 billion. Which is not to say the winner — and I hope it was you — will be an instant billionaire. Whoever holds that special ticket, assuming someone wins at all, will have the choice of taking 30 annual payments of $30 million or so before taxes or “settling” for a single lump payment in the $500 to $600 million range. Taxes would leave the winner with only about $300 to $400 million — a paltry sum, indeed.

By now, you will have heard all the warnings about the unlikelihood that any particular ticket is the winner. Last fall, lottery officials made it even tougher to win the Powerball jackpot, reducing the odds from one in 175 million to one in 292.2 million.

According to the Book of Odds, that means you’re about 265 times more likely to be struck dead by a bolt of lightning than to have won the Powerball jackpot. Dying from an asteroid strike is about three times as likely. Dying in a terrorist attack? 29 times as likely. You’re just about as likely to die from a scorpion sting as you are to have won the Powerball jackpot.

Still, I hope you won.

If you did win, you can expect a call from us — and we won’t be the only ones. In order to keep things honest, lottery officials require that big winners be identified, and they like to distribute photos of the winners holding their big checks. All the ensuing publicity assures that the winner will find lots of new friends and long-lost relatives.

When we ran a story this week about Oliver’s Grocery owner Ricky Conner winning a $1-million prize in a lottery drawing, the first response under our Facebook post about the story was from someone looking for financial help. I imagine that’s not the last time Conner — a guy already known for his generosity, even before becoming a lottery millionaire — will hear from someone with a story of great need.

Multiply that result by the extra fame and fortune associated with Powerball, and you can be sure the winner will have his or her hands full, fending off requests for help.

I hope it was you, and if it was, then I hope you’ll be able to find a peaceful place where you can be anonymous. But the odds are against it.