Image copyright ABCAmerican Idol's 18th winner, Just Sam, celebrated alone on Sunday after taking part in the finale under lockdown in Los Angeles.
Samantha Diaz, 21, from Harlem, New York, was told she'd won the public vote by host Ryan Seacrest, who was broadcasting from his garage.
She heard the news while clutching an iPad that was connected to a call with her grandmother, who brought her up.
"Can I thank America now?" asked the singer. "My dreams have come true."
American Idol has soldiered on through the coronavirus pandemic, with the flashy neon sets and pyrotechnics replaced by gardens, garages and bedrooms.
Just Sam relocated from New York to LA for the live stages of the singing contest. When the show started filming remotely due to the pandemic, she faced a tough choice - either return to Harlem or remain alone in quarantine in LA.
In the end, she chose the latter for her grandmother's safety.
"I get to stay in California so that my grandmother could be OK and so I don't risk getting her sick," she said on the show. "I don't have much, just my two suitcases that I had packed about two months ago."
Over the weeks, Just Sam captured viewers' hearts with her emotional back story, vivacious personality and soul-stirring vocals.
Formerly a subway singer in New York, she broke down in tears while auditioning for the show in Washington DC last year, before stunning the judges with a stirring performance of Andra Day's Rise Up.
The singer had a tough upbringing. With her mother in jail, she spent time in foster care before being adopted at the age of six by her Liberian grandmother, Elizabeth.
"She made sure we were fed, she made sure we had a roof over our head, she made sure we had clothes on our backs," she told American Idol.
She took on her stage name at high school after being bullied over her appearance.
"In high school, they didn't know which category to put me in," she said in one episode. "I wasn't a girl, not a boy, but both. And I'm like, 'Just Sam - it sounds perfect. I think I'm going to use that as my stage name forever.'"
In the final, she faced stiff competition from Arthur Gunn, a Nepalese-American singer whose gritty rock vocals made him one of the favourites to win.
But Sam's powerful rendition of Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You), by the first ever Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, and an emotional reprise of Day's Rise Up earned her the public vote.
Rise Up will be released as her first single on Monday.
"My grandmother has been saying that she doesn't believe that people like us can have their dreams come true," she said during the show. "This is proof to her!"
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