Karen Kuldys speaks after losing a million dollars

Karen Kuldys seems like a nice lady who just got screwed out of a million bucks.

The Winnipeg Blue Bomber fan – she and her husband Stan went to a game on one of their first dates – have given a series of interviews in the wake of the horrendous call that cost them a million dollars in the Safeway and Sobeys Touchdown to Win contest, which pays $1 million if two kickoffs are returned for touchdowns in the same game.

“I was a bad call away from a million dollars,” she told Darrin Bauming on the TSN1290 post-game show. “I’m not a professional CFLer but I knew it was not a penalty.”

Kuldys also spoke to Devon Heroux at CBC and said the family would have used the money to allow their daughter – who is a manager at Superstore, a Safeway rival – to stay home with Karen’s young granddaughter.

“First thing I said to Stan was that Michelle could stay home with the baby. Yesterday she said ‘mom I’m pretty emotional, it’ll be hard to go back to work,'” Karen told Heroux.

Karen seems a little overwhelmed by the attention – she handed the phone to Stan in the middle of the TSN interview when the talk turned to football – and it took some time for her to fully understand how badly she’d been hosed.

“I was in the kitchen washing dishes after supper, my husband was in the living room watching the game,” Kuldys told Bauming. “My son called… saying we’d won something: pots and pans I thought.”

Still, she’s figured it out now.

“My heart just sank and I thought — oh my god how close could I get to one million dollars,” she told Heroux. “You got to be kidding me. My stomach is in knots just thinking about it right now.”