Emma Boettcher said she auditioned for “Jeopardy!” four times before she got the call in February to compete on the quiz show, and she wound up making history on Monday’s episode.

Boettcher, a 27-year-old University of Chicago librarian who lives on the North Side, ended Naperville native James Holzhauer’s chances of beating the $2.52 million Ken Jennings earned during his 2004 winning streak.

Holzhauer’s episodes began airing in April. Boettcher said she taped Monday’s episode in March, and she didn’t know that Holzhauer was a 32-day champion until that information was revealed as contestants gathered before taping got underway.

The contestant coordinators “get around to introducing the returning champion, who’s in there with you, and they mentioned, ‘This is James. He’s won 32 games. He’s won however many million dollars.’ So that was the first time I had heard of him. Those numbers, I heard them, and I thought, ‘That's not real, what’s the real number?’ And the real number never came because that was the real number, so I went into denial pretty early on,” Boettcher told the Tribune by phone Monday.

But Boettcher, who has been watching “Jeopardy!” for a long time and tracking her scores at home in a notebook for five years, already had a strategy to go for higher-value clues and find the “Daily Doubles.” Holzhauer got the “Daily Double” in the first round right, and Boettcher nailed the two “Daily Doubles” in the second round.

She led Holzhauer by $3,200 going into “Final Jeopardy” and she was “delighted” to see the final clue was about William Shakespeare’s era. Boettcher knew it was her category — she was an English major at Princeton University and her undergraduate thesis was on Shakespeare’s plays.

She easily won the game, but said she wouldn’t let herself celebrate until she heard “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek announce the results.

“I had to keep my nerves, keep my energy very level so that I could sustain what I was doing” for the next game, Boettcher said.

She won $46,801, which she said she plans to use to pay off student loans and give back to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science. She got her master’s degree in information science from UNC in 2016, and wrote her master’s paper on predicting the difficulty of trivia questions using “Jeopardy!” clues.

“I gained so much from that experience academically, and I think this would be a nice way to bring that full-circle,” said Boettcher, who hails from the Philadelphia area and moved to Chicago in 2016.

On Tuesday's episode, she faces a New York graphic designer and a California PhD student. As of early Monday evening, she had not watched herself beat Holzhauer on TV.

“It’s been remarkable as a fan to have watched his run. James is such a great player. And for me, it would have been an honor to have played him regardless of how the game had turned out. It’s been nice having watched the show for so long and to feel like I’ve kind of made my mark on the ‘Jeopardy!’ history in that way,” Boettcher said.

“Jeopardy!” airs at 3:30 p.m. weekdays on WLS-Ch. 7.

tswartz@tribpub.com

Twitter @tracyswartz

MORE COVERAGE: 'Jeopardy!' producer: 'Appropriate' action planned in leak of James Holzhauer's loss »

'Jeopardy!' ratings: James Holzhauer's defeat most watched episode in 14 years »

After 32 consecutive wins, Naperville native James Holzhauer loses on 'Jeopardy!' »

What it's like to audition for 'Jeopardy' in Chicago »

How 2 Chicago natives will spend their prize from the 'Jeopardy' all-stars tournament »

Watch Emma Boettcher take down James Holzhauer