“The number we missed out on was my birth date. We were pretty stiff,” he says. Seven years on and the Newport father-of-two still carries a photo of the ticket on his phone.

“To be honest, we couldn’t quite believe you could get so close and then just not follow through. I think that’s why we took the photo,” he says. On the upside, the pair won $1100.

“It did probably take us a few months to get over it because you can’t help but think about what you would’ve done with the money. You know, it would’ve meant not having to rush back to work when the kids were so young," says Mr Kelly, who works as a teacher in Altona. “But we moved on. I’m not in counselling,” he laughs.

Tom, a Melbourne father who only wanted to give his first name, has dined out on his near miss at winning $1 million for years. “It was a Saturday afternoon and I just had this really weird feeling that I was going to win Tattslotto. I’d never bought a ticket before and I didn’t have a cent to my name but I knew I had to buy a ticket,” he says.

“Back then the cheapest ticket you could buy was $1.10 and I had 50 cents. I hit my older sister up for the extra 60 cents and said I’d split the winnings with her. She laughed at me of course and told me to nick off.”

After rustling through drawers and coat pockets, Tom raised the coins and chose numbers that had some meaning, including his birth date, his favourite footy player’s number and his house number. That night he watched the draw live while his mum did knitting and his dad read the paper.

“They drew the first number, and I said ‘yep, I’ve got the first one, and then sure enough I said ‘yep, I’ve got the second one’ and when I had the third one, my dad sort of looked up and my mum asked if I was joking.

“And then I had the fourth number in the row and then the fifth, and by then the whole family was watching and I just needed one more number to get the jackpot.”

He still remembers the number that eluded him that night. “I needed number 31, which was our house number at the time, and I remember I missed it by one digit ... It was that close.”

Instead of becoming a teenage millionaire he pocketed $1100 and he is not the one person he knows to have got excruciatingly close to the big windfall. The week after one close friend left work, where he had been part of a syndicate, his colleagues each won half a million dollars.

“It was quite a few years ago now but he still doesn’t like to talk to about it,” Tom says. Last year two Sydney construction workers made global headlines when it was revealed they missed out on a share of a $2.2 million lotto syndicate win after they chose to buy a burger for lunch instead of chip in $10 for a ticket with their colleagues.

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The Lotto's Lauren Cooney says in September, there was an average of 53 division two winners in each Saturday Lotto draw, four division two winners in each Oz Lotto draw, and nine division two winners in each Powerball draw.

Brisbane-based psychologist Christine Bagley-Jones says for near winners such as these the experience can be "gut-wrenching ... and really upsetting".

“The first step for people who find themselves in this situation is to give yourself the opportunity to acknowledge the disappointment and the loss that you’re feeling and allow yourself the time to deal with it," she says. “Beyond that, it’s about recovering from that sense of missing out by taking stock of what you actually have in your life that is still really good."