When Dave climbed up Mark Adair’s steps, ready to change his life forever, Mark was definitely not expecting a huge prize from PCH. He was expecting dinner!

After Dave greeted Mark at the door and confirmed that he was the same Mark that PCH was looking for, Mark blurted out, “Oh, OK, well this is kind of a surprise.” Clearly, he had just noticed the giant check that Dave was holding!

“I was actually expecting dinner.”

“You weren’t expecting us, huh?” asked Dave.

“No, I was not, I was actually expecting dinner” said Mark. “But that’s OK, I’m much happier having this!”

Either Mark hadn’t ordered a very tasty dinner, or Mark simply knew what was coming next, because Dave soon cut to the chase. “Well guess what,” Dave said. “We have a big surprise for you today … It’s a million dollars!” And then he turned over the giant check he was holding, flashing the surreal number on the front. Sure enough, the check said “$1,000,000!”

Understandably shocked and surprised by this enormous, earth-shattering amount of money, Dave could only say, “Oh my goodness!” But the gigantic smile on his face said even more.

“For real??”

Just to confirm again that Mark was, you know, Mark, Dave asked, “You enter our sweepstakes all the time, don’t you?”

Still humbled and amazed, Mark looked at the check and said, “Well, I guess so!” Then he laughed and added, “This is quite a surprise, thank you very much!” He simply couldn’t thank Dave enough!

“Well, I’m glad you’re home,” said Dave. “Congratulations.”

But that’s when Sarah stepped outside.

Surely, Sarah had been expecting dinner, too, but when Dave told her, “We just surprised Mark with a million dollars,” she simply stared at the check and then looked back at Mark and said, “For real?”

But Mark wasn’t playing a prank on Sarah, because he confirmed that the check was real! And that’s when Sarah realized that her life had changed, too! Once she stepped out onto the porch, saw the cameras flash, heard them click, and held Dave’s very real roses in her arms, she found everything to ve very, very real. Soon, a giant smile erupted on her face, too.

“This is not an April Fools’ Joke!”

Then came the moment that Mark had surely been waiting for: He got to hold his shiny new check!

“You can hang this on the living room wall and that will look very nice,” said Dave. And then he held out Mark’s first “deposit” of $25,000 to “get him started,” causing Mark and Sarah to finally say, “Wow!” There was something about a real, tangible check that made their jaws drop! The $1,000,000 was slowly becoming reality!

Then it was time to daydream about how to spend the new sum of money. “Now that you have some extra cash,” asked Dave, “Is there something that pops into your mind?”

“We could probably go on a trip or something like that,” said Mark. A trip of a lifetime, no doubt!! But Mark will save travel planning for another day. “It was a good idea to enter those sweepstakes, right?” he added.

Dave agreed and said, “You’ve had to believe it was real, right? But there’s some people that don’t believe it’s real. What would you tell those people?”

“Well,” said Mark, looking into the camera. “We just won a million dollars.”

But Sarah, who still didn’t feel 100% satisfied that everything was real, couldn’t help but ask, “Is this an April Fools’ Joke?”

Dave was happy to put her fears to rest. “It is April Fools’ Day, but this is not an April Fools’ Joke,” he said. “This is for real.”

Yep, Sarah and Mark really were a million dollars richer.

More ways to win!

Looking for more fun ways to collect tokens and enter PCH sweepstakes? If you take any of our brain-tickling, 20-question quizzes at PCHquizzes, you’ll score 200 tokens for each correct answer — that’s a whopping 4,000 tokens per quiz for answering 100% correctly! You can also peruse a short, entertaining slideshow at PCHfrontpage and, if you click through to another slideshow, you’ll bank 1,000 tokens. Pretty easy, right? You’re welcome!