old ipad, old appleid, still locked out.

Hi, my daughter entered my iPad Pro password incorrectly like a year ago. And then she promptly misplaced it, I searched high and low for weeks and could not find it. I found it about a month ago, and I charged it, and it turned on and told me that the iPad was disabled, and I needed to connect it to iTunes.

I did all of that, I downloaded iTunes onto my computer, I followed all the steps to restore to factory settings. I was doing the setup when it told me that this iPad was locked so that only the user could use it. I tried to sign in with my existing AppleID that I use currently on my phone, but the iCloud account that popped up for this isn't one I can remember at all. I tried to recover and it is sending to an email address I don't recognize either.

I read stuff saying that if you cannot get ahold of the previous owner (me, but like 5 years ago when I was taking classes and got it for taking notes and a planner), and you cannot use their passcode to unlock it, you can never use the iPad again?? And I just feel like 1. while I realize I did not have the ability to use it for a year because I could not find it, that does not change that now that I have, this is far too expensive to be told that I will never be able to use it again, and 2, there has to be another way.

I have this iPad through Verizon, I did not buy it at an Apple store, and I don't know if that matters. Short of driving to an Apple store, is there ANYTHING else that I might be able to try, that I can do from home or my itunes account or literally anything?