Then Tina Howard turned her key.

“And it kept going,” she said, “and that’s when I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do? I don’t know what I’m going to do.’”

She can move, for starters. Tina won the “Giving Away the House” contest presented by the Pistons, Hunter Pasteur Homes and Channel 955, and now owns a $250,000 home in Clarkston. The season-long giveaway concluded at halftime of Tuesday’s Pistons-Timberwolves game.

The timing couldn’t be better for Tina and her husband of two years, Chauncey. The couple has a 16-month-old daughter, Christina, and is expecting its second child in late August. In light of their growing family, the Howards already had placed their two-bedroom condo in Macomb on the market.

“We’re trying to sell it right now, to get a house,” Chauncey said. “We’ve got to get a bigger space.”

One key winner was selected by random drawing at each Pistons home game this season, with Channel 955 selecting the other 10 key winners. Tina won her key at a game in March, when she “just happened to be walking by the booth” to enter the drawing. She was at the game with tickets from her boss at Hantz, Randazzo and Associates, a CPA firm headquartered in Macomb. Coincidentally, “I just finished filing all my tax returns today and came to the game,” she said.

The Howards’ 2007 returns are in, but the 2008 returns just got a little trickier. And Chauncey, a CNC machinist who watched the contest unfold from their seats in section 207, couldn’t care less.

“I jumped up and down,” he said. “I went crazy. I was glad nobody was sitting next to me. I thought we just won the championship.”

More than half of the 50 house hopefuls had turned their keys when it was Tina who nervously stepped forward.

“If the baby wasn’t kicking, the butterflies in my stomach were getting me because everybody kept jiggling the key,” Tina said. “I just dropped to my knees when I realized the door opened.”

The suspenseful halftime show was just what the partners at Hunter Pasteur Homes had hoped for when they donated the house that made this giveaway possible.

“It was very exciting seeing all the people line up,” said Howard Gitler, one of the partners. “They were excited to see if they were going to win. People were blowing on the keys like they were at the casino. It was very dramatic that 35 people went up and all of a sudden, a lady turned the key, started crying and said, ‘You don’t know what this means to me; it’s a life-changing experience. This is an unbelievable thing.’”

Tina’s mother in Imlay City, Theresa, certainly will have trouble believing it. “She didn’t think we would win,” Tina said. “That’s why she’s my first phone call.”

After that, the happy homeowner said, “it will be a mass text message to everyone else in my cell phone: ’Party in Clarkston.’”