RALEIGH – Michelle Stewart, a bartender from Gastonia, has won the prize of a lifetime. Saturday, she purchased a ticket for the $200,000 a Year for Life game from the Save Mart on South New Hope Road in Gastonia and scratched it off in her car outside the store. The prize shown was $50,000 a Year for Life.

“I went back in the store shocked and shaking,” Stewart said.

The clerk scanned the ticket and confirmed she had to collect her prize at a claim center. Stewart locked the ticket in a safe until Monday morning when she made the trip to collect her winnings at lottery headquarters in Raleigh.

“It’s finally hitting me now,” she said as she received her first check of $34,006 after taxes. “It didn’t seem like it was real.”

Stewart, 40, will receive a similar check every year for the rest of her life. The game guarantees that the winner or her estate will receive a minimum of $1 million paid out over 20 years. The $200,000 a Year for Life game started Jan. 25, 2011. As of Tuesday morning, one top prize of $200,000 a Year for Life and two prizes of $50,000 a Year for Life remain unclaimed.

Through June 30 of last year, Gaston County players won more than $75.4 million in prizes and local retailers earned more than $9.3 million in commissions on ticket sales. During the same time frame, Gaston County education programs received more than $44.8 million in lottery funds. By law, those funds pay for teachers’ salaries in grades K-3, school construction, need-based college scholarships, and prekindergarten programs for at-risk four-year olds.

To date, the N.C. Education Lottery has raised more than $2.2 billion for these initiatives statewide.