If you work for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, you might want to consider buying a lottery ticket or two.

That’s all I can think of after seeing the latest news from the Associated Press. You see, the museum was looking into geothermal heating, drilled a hole in the parking lot to study the possibility and … well, it struck a dinosaur.

Seriously.

“It’s like winning the Willy Wonka factory,” James Hagadorn, the museum’s curator of geology told the AP after the drilling turned up a small fossil from a long-ago plant-eater. “It’s incredible, it’s super rare.”

If you’ve never been to the natural history museum — and as a kid, I would have lived at the place if my parents had let me — one of the many cool things it has to share is a collection of dinosaur fossils. So finding one in a 2-inch-wide hole just outside the building is a little like the Colorado Rockies finding their next starter in the hot dog line at Coors Field. Or maybe like Zales doing landscaping work outside one of their shops and digging up a small diamond in the process.

Either way, the results don’t have to be impressive to be very, very astonishing. And maybe just a little familiar.

No, I don’t mean that I’ve been digging up Cretaceous-era fossils over my lunch break or anything like that. (Sorry, Mr. Spielberg.) But I think a lot of us have at least one personal tale of setting out to do the ordinary and stumbling into the extraordinary.

For me, that’s probably most of my amateur theater career. I tend to be a “character actor,” inhabiting fun supporting roles. But I also have a reputation as an Emergency Understudy who can learn parts on short notice — which is how I once wound up with the lead in an Agatha Christie mystery that I’d never even auditioned for.

Others could talk about meeting the person of their dreams while on a simple errand … or a close call that barely got avoided through a moment’s alertness … or an opportunity that came up simply by being in the right place at the right time. Call it luck or fate or serendipity or whatever term your word-of-the-day calendar may prefer.

But it starts with a willingness to try.

My mom loves to quote the Woody Allen phrase about how 80% of success is showing up. Strange and wonderful things can sometimes cross your path — but you have to actually be on a path to start with. If you’re rarely putting yourself out there, even in the most mundane of ways, you’re not giving yourself many opportunities.

If you drill no holes, you find no dinosaurs.

It comes back to one of my favorite words in this column: hope. Not wishing upon a star and waiting for Disney’s Blue Fairy to show up, but dreaming of something better and then trying to make it happen. Even when the odds seem long or the situation seems desperate.

Hope isn’t fragile. It’s a brawler. An explorer. A door left open for possibility to walk through, with a sign reading “Open House.”

When you’re alert for that possibility, the strangest things can cross your path on the way. But you’ll never notice them if your eyes aren’t open.

So stay aware. See what’s around you. Care.

And if you want to spend some time at the natural history museum while you’re doing all that caring, I don’t blame you in the least.

Let me know if you trip over the next Rockies All-Star on the way, OK?