St. Paul Saints keep their word: Lucky fan will win $10,000 after NCAA upset

Saturday was already going to be a busy morning for St. Paul Saints GM Derek Sharrer with single-game tickets going on sale. Then a couple of hours before the clock struck midnight a Cinderella team the Saints can certainly relate to crept into his life.

"I haven't heard, 'What were you thinking?' yet but I assume I will," Sharrer said.

It began not as a joke but as an attention grab. The Saints sent out a tweet last Monday promising $10,000 for one lucky retweet if a No. 16 seed could knock off a No. 1 – a feat that had never been done in the history of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Never gonna happen, right?

Then late Friday night Maryland-Baltimore County kept making three-pointers against Virginia.

The buzzer sounded on a 20-point upset for the ages, and Sharrer reached for the nearest pen.

"Absolutely crazy," Sharrer said of the game and the promotion. "I don't even know if you'd call this a mid-major – it's a low-major going up and beating one of the blue bloods and a top seed. We can relate a little bit to those guys being the small team in a big market and we're excited to pull a winner."

And excited to part with ten grand?

"I tell you what: Watching that retweet ticker was like the Jerry Lewis telethon when I was a kid," Sharrer said. "The number just kept going up."

The Saints' original post has nearly 15,000 retweets. The team will head to social media once again to pick a winner at 1 p.m. Tuesday live on Facebook, Twitter and Periscope.