For years, North Carolina has held out against the nation's lottery boom, making it the largest of just 10 states in the nation without government-run gambling.

Now, though, the numbers may finally be coming up in favor of a numbers game in the only East Coast state without one.

The speaker of the state House of Representatives has said he now favors a lottery, joining second-term Gov. Mike Easley, a longtime proponent. Speaker Jim Black, D-Mecklenburg, says he intends to bring a lottery bill to the House floor where past lottery efforts have died within weeks. He also plans to name a special committee to hear the bill, to ensure it doesn't get tripped up on its way to the floor.

Observers say North Carolina's long resistance to a lottery results from a proud, stubborn streak, an alliance of liberals and antigambling conservatives and one of the strongest economies in the Southeast.

"There is that strain in our state genetic makeup, that we're a fiercely independent state, a state that doesn't just follow the crowd, a state that just follows its own impulses," said Ferrell Guillory, director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But North Carolina's long economic boom came to an end earlier this decade, and the state has been hit hard by the decline of traditional industries like tobacco, textiles and furniture.

The state's recovery from the recession has been halting, and lawmakers returned for their biannual budget-writing session this year knowing that the state already faces a $1 billion gap between revenues and spending for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Medicaid costs and rulings that compel the state to spend more on education will keep the pressure on revenues to grow.

The last time a lottery bill made it to a House vote, in September 2002, Republicans and mostly liberal Democrats allied to defeat a measure, 69-50, that would have given citizens an advisory vote on whether to start one.

Since then, Tennessee has added a lottery, making North Carolina an island surrounded by four states with numbers games. South Carolina has said it earned more than $151 million for education during the first year of the lottery it started in 2002.

Lawmakers like Black have grown tired both of watching an estimated 300 million North Carolina dollars a year go to other states' games and having to scrape to find ways to meet mushrooming spending demands.

That has put the speaker on the same side of the issue as longtime lottery proponent Easley, a fellow Democrat who estimates a game could bring in $450 million to $500 million a year. Opponents argue the amount would be less.

The speaker says his focus is on recapturing money spent on other states' games and that all revenue from a lottery should go to education. He also wants to limit the amount of money spent advertising the game.