New York Post

If you’ve got an urge to splurge

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NEW Yorkers were dreaming big about what they’d do with the Mega Millions jackpot — but they should dream bigger. Season tickets for your favorite team? No, just buy the team.

For $395 million, a long-suffering hockey fan could buy the New York Islanders and see if they could run the team better than the current regime.

Parting with the entirety of your windfall could also net you a 27 percent stake in the Mets, or you could spring $520 million to buy both the New York City Football Club and New York Red Bulls.

Those rushing to buy tickets Monday were dreaming of getting out town — without stopping to think that they could just buy their own town.

“I would just live life and travel,” said Jerry Denis, 38, an X-ray technician buying tickets for both Mega Millions and Powerball in Brooklyn. “I would go to St. Lucia, Asia and Fiji because it’s warm and in the pictures it looks beautiful.”

But the $572,837,896 jackpot amounts to over a third of St. Lucia’s 2017 gross domestic product.

Winners stuck on staying local could also help feed — and transport — their fellow New Yorkers.

Forget just dining at the three-Michelin-star Masa restaurant in Midtown, where a meal goes for $595 per head. You could pick up the tab for every patron in the 26-seat joint, 365 days a year, for 10 years and still have spent less than 10 percent of your fortune. Worried about all those calories? Not an issue. Another tenth of the windfall would be enough to sign up 338,957 people for a $169 annual Citi Bike membership.

And it would take a little less than half of the pot to put a seven-day unlimited MetroCard in the pocket of every Gothamite.

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