It is pretty safe to say that a large majority of Washington residents weren’t in the best mood on Sunday, Feb. 1. But, even before the turnover in the fourth quarter ended the Seahawks’ hopes for another championship, a group of twelves from Ravensdale were dealing with another loss.

Tina McDonough and her husband Cory, 10-year season ticket holders and Super Bowl XLVIII attendees, booked their flight and hotel for Super Bowl XLIX back in November. The morning of Jan. 19, the day after the Seahawks won the NFC Championship, they purchased their tickets for the big game in Arizona.

Not only are Tina and Cory supporters of their local NFL team, they also support their own community in a big way.

Over the past seven years, McDonough and her Valley Girls and Guys team have raised more than $1.5 million for the Susan G. Komen foundation for breast cancer research.

Tina said she used a third party website to purchase their tickets after comparing prices on several other websites. A couple days later, she said, she received a confirmation for her ticket order and an invoice. A few more days passed and Tina said she received an email stating the tickets would be available to pick up at 11 a.m. the day of the Super Bowl.

Then, on Thursday, Jan. 29 she received another email from the seller stating they would not be getting their tickets and they would issue a 125 percent refund for the amount that she paid.

The email reads, “Our trustworthy connection for obtaining tickets for this event that we were working with has failed us.”

Tina said she was very emotional about the situation and spent the next several hours hunting for tickets online. She said the price for a single ticket in the same section as her other tickets were going for $12,500. She originally paid $2,390 per ticket.

After another phone call to the ticket seller, they settled on getting a 150 percent refund back, which the McDonough’s received Thursday, Feb. 5

But, they still wanted to go to the game.

“It was never about the money,” Tina said.

Despite not having tickets in hand, she and her husband and their two friends boarded their flight in SeaTac and flew down south.

Upon their arrival in Arizona on Saturday, Jan. 31, Tina said they “hit the pavement” trying to find tickets at a reasonable price.

“We got news stations involved,” she explained.

After interviews with the media, she said they found someone with three tickets to sell for $5,000 each.

She said, “We had a glimmer of hope.”

But, Tina said once the seller found out that the tickets were going for $9,000 elsewhere, he wanted $3,000 more per ticket.

But Tina, Cory and their friends were capped out at $5,000 per ticket.

“We were going to pay the $5,000 for the three tickets and then pay the big money for the fourth,” Tina said. “That was our max.”

The four “twelves” spent their Super Bowl Sunday watching the game from a nearby bar.

Since their story was first aired on KOMO News, Tina said they have received some backlash from people saying, “lots of people…couldn’t get tickets.”

Tina equated her trip to the Super Bowl as a family vacation.

“I don’t expect everybody to understand it,” she said. “Imagine that you’ve got your vacation (all planned out), then the carpet gets pulled out from you the day before. (My vacation) just happens to be the Super Bowl.”

Tina’s story is not the only one of its kind that came out of Arizona on Feb. 1. ESPN estimated that several hundred other football fans were left ticketless on Super Bowl Sunday.

The day before the big game, ESPN published a story on their website about the situation.

The article stated, “In most cases, those selling tickets never had them to begin with. The practice, called short selling, has become common for big games over the years.”

On Monday, Feb. 9, the office of Attorney General Bob Ferguson released a statement encouraging people to file complaints with their office if they purchased Super Bowl tickets and those tickets were unavailable to them by the brokers.

The release stated, “The office will review all complaints to determine whether individual brokers’ actions violated Washington State’s Consumer Protection Act.”

Consumer complaints can be filed at atg.wa.gov.