Somewhere in Ajax, Ontario, a guy does the most Canadian thing imaginable: he buys a Lotto Max ticket at a Shell station, checks it at the counter, and the machine basically goes, “Congrats, your life just changed.”

Sivakangar “Siv” Shanmuganathan has been playing the lottery for 15 years. Which is a polite way of saying he’s spent a decade and a half donating money to the national fund for crushed optimism. And then, on Dec. 23, 2025, it finally pays him back.

He checks his ticket at the gas station and the screen flashes: “Big Winner.”

That’s not a message. That’s a small spiritual event.

Siv is 51, an automotive technician, and the kind of person who apparently still believes in showing up to work even after fate hands him a seven-figure receipt. He matched all seven numbers in a Maxmillions draw and won $1 million.

And what does he do first?

He buys lunch for his coworkers.

Not a yacht. Not a watch. Not an emotional-support pickup truck.

Lunch.

But here’s the best part: he doesn’t even tell them why. He just quietly feeds everyone like some sort of benevolent workplace cryptid. Only his manager knows. Because of course the manager knows. The manager always knows.

Then Siv does the other thing most lottery winners say they’ll do but rarely mean: he keeps his job.

“I’ll keep my job,” he says, smiling, because he’s been there for over 20 years and he actually likes it.

Which, honestly, might be the rarest win in this entire story.

Now, the predictable stuff comes next: pay some bills, save for the future, help others. Standard “I’m not going to ruin my life” checklist.

But the real point of the money isn’t a sports car or a dramatic personality change. It’s his wife.

His wife has a dream of opening a daycare. And with a million dollars, that dream goes from “someday, maybe” to “okay, let’s start looking at leases and permits and figuring out why toddlers are basically tiny drunk negotiators.”

So yeah, he won the lottery. But the win isn’t the money.

The win is that he gets to look at the person he loves and say, “Let’s do it.”