A 92-year-old great-grandmother from Queens accidentally discarded a winning $1 million scratch-off lottery ticket – but a scrupulous supermarket clerk saved the day.

At a state lottery press conference in Flushing Meadows yesterday, Mary Alice Fallon, a regular customer at Deirdre Maeve’s supermarket in Breezy Point, recounted how she bought three tickets on Nov. 24.

The Far Rockaway woman scratched them, thought they were losers and asked the clerk to toss them.

But the employee, Chris Connelly, 24, decided to double-check the tickets, so he scanned their bar codes on the store’s lottery computer terminal.

And one, a “$1,000,000 Mania” ticket, “popped up a winner,” he said yesterday.

He had no idea it was a million-dollar winner, but he did have a clue it wasn’t chump change.

The machine’s instructions were for the winner to claim the prize at lottery headquarters, an indication the ticket was worth more than $600, the threshold for income-tax reporting.

“I told her, ‘Wait, I think you have a big winner here.’ I first thought maybe it was $1,000,” he said.

He scratched off squares on the ticket that she had missed, “and there it was, a million dollars. She was in disbelief, I was in disbelief,” he said.

“She kept asking, ‘Are you sure, are you sure?’ ”

Fallon said she knew something was up when Connelly’s face turned pale, then “I was almost numb” when she learned of her prize.

“If it wasn’t for Chris and his honesty, I could have thrown away $1 million without knowing it. I guess someone was watching out for me,” she said.

Connelly said he wasn’t tempted to pocket the cash.

“I know this woman well,” he said. “She comes in every day. It would have been bad karma if I kept it.”

Fallon is divvying up her newfound riches – to be distributed annually over two decades, according to lottery rules – with her seven children.

After taxes, each one, or their designated heirs, will net about $32,000 a year, or $4,000 apiece, for the next 20 years.

“What a way to end your life,” she said.

Connelly has been working at his parents’ grocery since graduating from Siena College two years ago.

Each of her children gave the honest, hardworking young man a $100 gift to thank him for helping their elderly mom find her fortune.

An appreciative Fallon “hooked me up” with the family’s generosity, said Connelly.

The state lottery also announced five other $1 million scratch-off winners, including Queens resident Lucille Kimble, 89, who is donating a portion of her winnings to a scholarship fund.

jennifer.fermino@nypost.com