CROOKED RIVER RANCH —

Pat Huffer, the head pro at Crooked River Ranch, is in the mood for wild proclamations.

“Come to the Ranch!” Huffer barks across the Crooked River Ranch pro shop. “Never made an ace? We can guarantee you one!”

Huffer is joking, of course, with the handful of golfers and employees milling about in the pro shop last week on a recent wintry morning.

Like any good joke, though, Huffer’s holds a nugget of truth.

Crooked River Ranch residents Len Johnson and Jack Martin are both in the room. Both were amazed this summer when two fellow Crooked River Ranch members — Ellie Rice and Jan Markham — aced Crooked River’s 11th hole while playing together. (I wrote about that achievement in August.)

But it would have been preposterous for them to think they could do the same.

Then on Oct. 28, Martin, a 66-year-old retired barber, aced Crooked River Ranch’s difficult 149-yard seventh hole. For an encore, Johnson, a 75-year-old retired U.S. Army officer and businessman, stepped to the tee and knocked in a hole-in-one himself.

Yes, for the second time this year, two golfers playing together aced the same hole at Crooked River Ranch.

According to a 2005 Golf Digest article, the odds of two average golfers in the same foursome acing the same hole are about 17 million to 1.

The odds of it happening twice exactly three months apart at the same golf course? Perhaps somebody over at MIT could figure that one out.

“I think we should buy lottery tickets,” says Martin, a slender, mild-mannered man who picked up golf just five years ago and counts last month’s ace as his first.

“You try to figure this stuff out, but there’s no way you can figure it out,” says Johnson, who is funny and outgoing and has scored six holes-in-one in his life. “It just happened.”

Martin, Johnson, Martin’s wife, Gail, and Johnson’s wife, Anita, had played together before. But this time their meeting was unplanned, and they decided on the spot to play nine holes as a foursome.

By the time the group reached the seventh hole — a short, uphill par 3 that Crooked River Ranch members have dubbed “the shortest par 5 in Oregon” — the wind was howling, Anita Johnson recalls.

Len Johnson recalls that he casually mentioned to Martin that the seventh was the lone par 3 at Crooked River Ranch that he had not aced in his 13 years as a Crooked River member.

“It’s a good time to get it,” Martin unknowingly foreshadowed.

Martin teed off first, using the one club he knew he could reach the front pin with.

“At least 95 percent of people that play that hole (end up) short and never get there,” Len Johnson observes, adding that in no wind the hole plays two clubs longer than its distance suggests. “So the wind is blowing in his face and Jack says, ‘I’m going to hit a driver.’ ”

The shallow two-tier green on No. 7 slopes forward, and balls tend to roll off the front edge of the green. But Martin’s shot never came down the hill.

Johnson suspected it might be an ace. But Martin was not buying it.

“It’s just something you don’t think about,” says Martin.

Martin patiently waited for Johnson, who choked up on a nearly 20-year-old 5-wood for his shot.

“As soon as he hit he said, ‘I think that might be in, too,’ ” Martin recalls.

Johnson was so confident he didn’t even bother taking his putter to the green. His presumption was justified.

“Jack was dumbfounded,” Anita Johnson says. “He said, ‘I thought I would feel different than this.’ ”

“I asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ ” Len Johnson says. “He said, ‘Kind of numb.’ I told him that’s the way you are supposed to feel.”

Once the feat was absorbed, Anita Johnson called her friend, Ellie Rice, to share the news.

“She said, ‘Oh no! Really?’” Johnson recalls, adding that Rice was thrilled.

Like their husbands, the wives did not outwardly get too excited.

“They were into their own games,” Martin says.

Or maybe their subdued reaction was for another reason.

“They’ll never hear the end of it,” Johnson says.

The thought causes Anita Johnson to roll her eyes.

In a way, Johnson and Martin are unlikely candidates for such a feat.

“To be honest, I thought I would never get a hole-in-one,” says Martin, who has worked his way up to a 19 handicap index.

“I used to try to play quite a bit of golf and play semi-quality golf,” says Johnson, a 20 handicap. “Now I’m strictly into quantity. The quality is gone.”

But Johnson says aces are not about talent.

“You can’t explain those things,” he says. “It’s just luck.”

Nearly a week after Johnson and Martin paired up for the aces, it was still the talk around the Crooked River Ranch clubhouse.

“Nobody has sent us any money or anything,” Johnson jokes.

“Yeah right, I was wondering when the money starts rolling in,” says Martin.

Riches probably are not in the cards.

But like Markham and Rice, these two are now part of a very select club and linked together forever.