A $280 million Powerball jackpot lured throngs of hopeful players to buy lottery tickets from the few retailers still open on Christmas Day -- convenience stores and gas stations.

Wednesday's Powerball jackpot was the third largest since the game started and the fifth largest payoff in the world. The largest Powerball jackpot was $297.5 million on July 29, 1998; last summer it reached $295 million.

Country Fair in Hempfield Township did "pretty good" with Christmas Day ticket sales, said employee Donna Connelly.

"You have to play to win. You'll get some people who buy more than others, but people usually buy about $10 worth of tickets," she said.

Dairy Mart in West Middlesex experienced a large influx in ticket sales this week, said employee Angela Espenschide. For the past three days sales have more than quadrupled from the regular 300 per day up to 2,000.

"Ever since the jackpot hit 175 million, sales have been going up," she said, adding that most customers were buying five or more tickets at a time.

On Tuesday, people in Pennsylvania were buying as much as 600 tickets each second, said Joe Mahoney, a spokesman for the Multi-State Lottery Association.

Powerball is played in 23 states, including Pennsylvania, as well as the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

To help last-minute Powerball players find their way to a ticket, the District of Columbia Lottery took out an ad in Wednesday's Washington Post, listing about 90 places open Christmas Day that sell the tickets.

A list may have helped Mercer County area players, who were looking to buy tickets on Wednesday.

Sheetz Inc. convenience stores, which stayed open on the holiday, don't sell Powerball tickets. They sell only instant lottery tickets, or scratch-offs.

It's a shame too, said a male employee at the Mercer store, where about 400 hopeful ticket buyers were turned away this week; about 100 of them on Wednesday.

The Powerball numbers were drawn at 10:59 p.m. Wednesday, after The Herald's publication deadline. The winning numbers will be published Friday.

Powerball's larger jackpots helped put the Pennsylvania Lottery on a pace for another record-setting year.

As of Monday, the lottery had sold $1.04 billion worth of tickets, up 10 percent from $946 million last year and the first time the Pennsylvania Lottery reached the $1 billion mark before Christmas.

And that didn't count the tickets that people with visions of instant wealth bought by the fistful for Wednesday's Powerball.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Lottery sold a record $1.9 billion in tickets, garnering $749 million in revenue for senior citizen programs.

The biggest boost came from a 19 percent increase in instant game sales, which rose from $608 million to $721 million.

Despite the record year, officials projected the lottery fund would be short $187 million by July 2003 and entered the Powerball market in June in an effort to fill the gaps.

Sales of most tickets are steady, but the state's former big jackpot game, the Super Six, is down by half.

The Powerball jackpot begins at $10 million and typically rolls over several million dollars at a time. The Super 6 Lotto jackpot starts at $3 million and rolls over $1 million at a time. The record Powerball jackpot is $295.7 million, while the record Super 6 Lotto jackpot is $86 million.

Lottery proceeds fund several programs for the elderly, including two prescription drug assistance programs, reduced public-transportation rates and property tax and rent rebates.