Odds are you won’t win. Me either.

Someone might, though, and it could be a Mainer.

With a $128 million top prize, tonight’s Powerball jackpot is the highest since Maine joined the Multi-State Lottery Association on July 30, according to Pam Coutes, the state lottery system’s deputy director. For that matter, it’s the highest payoff on a game of chance ever offered in the state.

Christie Girard says she knows what she’ll do with the dough if she wins: “Leave the state,” she says with a smile.

She’d move with her family to South Carolina to join her mother there, Girard says. “It’s warm down there,” adds the Lewiston woman.

Girard plays Powerball twice a week, buying five or six tickets for the Saturday and Wednesday drawings. Half the numbers she chooses are favorites, she says, and half are quick picks.

She works at Simones Market on Lewiston’s Lisbon Street, a lottery sales agent, and notes that the job makes it easy for her to get her tickets – no special trip needed.

The store has a group of regular customers who buy Powerball tickets, she says. One fellow snatched up $35 worth of the chances Tuesday in advance of Wednesday’s state record drawing, Girard said.

Sales Tuesday afternoon were slower than slow, though. During one 45-minute span, only one Powerball ticket was sold.

That wasn’t unusual. Clerks working at the 7-Eleven on Main Street in Lewiston, at Roopers in Lisbon and at Bretton’s Market in Livermore each said they expect to see sales increase today.

“People wait until the last minute,” said the Roopers employee. “Tomorrow will be a big day,” said the 7-Eleven clerk Tuesday evening.

Scratch tickets, says Girard, seem to be far more popular with Simones customers, even if their payout is peanuts by comparison to Powerball.

While tonight’s drawing has a top prize advertised at $128 million, that’s only the amount the winner will get if he or she agrees to take the money in yearly installments doled out over the next couple of decades.

The lump-sum cash value is $70.7 million. That’s how most winners take their prize, according to Powerball payoff data.

Maine has yet to record a Powerball jackpot winner. Some folks with Maine connections have basked in the game’s limelight, however. A $25.2 million Powerball ticket sold at the State Line Store in Center Conway, N.H., was claimed in January 1998 by the PB 90 and PB 10 Trust of Lewiston, Multi-State Lottery officials said.

That same store sold the ticket that won the largest jackpot ever paid out in New Hampshire, $135 million, for the drawing Aug. 30, 2003.

Powerball’s largest pot was a whopping $314.9 million. A single ticket was sold for the Christmas Day, 2002 drawing. The winner, a West Virginia man, opted to take his prize in cash: $170.5 million, a Multi-State spokesman said.

By the way, for those who bet against the odds, the chances of winning tonight’s pot o’ gold are 1 in 120,526,770.

For a buck, a lot of folks will take that chance.