They got lucky/narrowed the search space. Just because it will take me 2 years to evaluate all the possibilities, doesn't mean I won't immediately hit aaaaaaaa
I guess that cracking this specific password could be said to have been parallelized over multiple individuals over the years, and it wouldn't surprise me if it had burnt multiple years of processor time. In the end, someone had to get lucky when picking their search space/exploration parameters :-)
