Happened to me too. I got this freebsd server, I use ssh keys to login. But I hadn't login for a while, so I couldn't remember the user's password (which gave access to 'root' via sudo). After 37 tries, I hit nailed it! I was that close from re-installing the system. It had automated backups so, no big deal... Just two-three hours (maybe more) would be lost.
If that was a Linux box, I would have booted into single user mode and changed the password. Or temporarily mounted the hard drive in a different machine and modified /etc/shadow directly. I assume you can do something similar in FreeBSD? Quicker then a re-install.
