‘Bachelor’ contestant sent home

She struck gold.

Even though Amy Kaplan was sent away in week three of The Bachelor , she quickly went from heartbroken to heartbroken.

Since the 63-year-old Queens native appeared on the show, she’s been flooded with messages from men she’s dated as well as strangers interested in pursuing her.

“My DMs are going crazy. Like anyone I’ve ever had a remotely single date with or had a glass of wine with,” Kaplan told The Washington Post this week.

“Some of them were strangers… I was a kid in a candy store.”

The spunky blonde beauty says this is how she prefers dating rather than competing with 22 other women to win one man’s heart, and she explained it to “Bachelor” Mel Owens early on.

“I’m used to men chasing me. I’m the prize. They come after me,” she said.

“I told him, ‘If you want to get to know me, come to me.’ And he did. He said he could train.”

However, Caplan knew there were no sparks flying with Owens, 66, because she met him late at night while she was making bacon for the cast – a scene that did not appear in the show.

“He followed me into the kitchen and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and I said, ‘I’m making turkey bacon,’ and I held it up and the photographer followed me and I said, ‘Who’s a good puppy?'” she recalled.

“Now, I was expecting him to either say ‘ruff ruff’ and go eat the bacon strips, or he was going to get down on his knees and gasp…but he looked at me and said, ‘What’s wrong with you?'”

Kaplan is the mom to Ellie and Lexi (aka the Kaplan twins), popular TikTok users with 2 million followers, which is how she was discovered on the hit ABC dating series.

“A casting director contacted my daughters and said, ‘We need her.’ I thought, ‘What? A reality dating show… you know what? I’m open to it. Maybe I met the love of my life there,” recalled Kaplan, who raised her children in Short Hills, New Jersey.

At the time, Owens — a former Los Angeles Rams linebacker turned sports lawyer — had not yet been announced as the “prime bachelor” — but once he was, Kaplan’s interest was piqued.

“I’d never dated an athlete before, so I was totally open to it,” she explained.

Before his season aired, Owens wreaked havoc on Bachelor Nation when he declared on his podcast that the age range of his future wives would be 45 to 60, bluntly stating, “If they were 60 or older, I would ax them.”

Kaplan is undeterred because she doesn’t feel her age at all.

“In my head, I’m still 30. … I can’t believe I’m over 60. I work out in the gym for two hours a day. There are 30-year-olds next to me,” she said. “They tell me they’re old. I say, ‘Old? Are you kidding me? Come on!’ I let them finish the workout.”

Once she met Owens, she cared less about what he said.

“I think he probably spoke before he thought. He probably did because there’s a scene in the pool where he jumps in with his sneakers on and a microphone on.”