SEATTLE — Hundreds of thousands of Seattle Seahawks fans crowded Lumen Field and the streets of downtown Seattle on Wednesday to celebrate the football team’s Super Bowl win in what felt like a blue-and-green citywide party.

Well before sunrise, some fans woke up to guarantee their spot on a bus, or pushed a discarded couch multiple blocks for a makeshift seating area, or scaled a 7-Eleven for a better vantage point. All to see their beloved Seahawks, who beat the New England Patriots, 29-13, on Sunday in their second Super Bowl win.

Along the parade’s route on Fourth Avenue, elbow room at the railing was going quickly shortly before 6:45 a.m. and seconds after the metal gates went up. The sun hadn’t even risen.

Hundreds unloaded from Sound Transit’s Sounder trains at King Street Station, already chanting “Sea! Hawks!” under the shadow of Lumen Field. Throughout the day, traffic appeared to run smoothly. Roads, ferries, light rail and buses all carried crowds to and from the parade, largely without incident.

Andrew Woods was on the first Sound Transit Sounder train out of Sumner around 5 a.m. Before the sun rose over Lumen Field, he was in the parking lot. Seating on the train was packed, but it was quiet, he said. Some people were dressed for work, others in blue and green.

“It’s a good feeling,” said Woods, 19, to be out here with the fans.

He was 7 years old the last time the Seahawks brought the Lombardi Trophy home and has wanted to play for the team itself ever since. Woods might be short of that dream, but he was grinning widely before his first Super Bowl victory parade alongside his mom and friends.

The celebration began with a short program at Lumen Field for fans lucky enough to score entry — tickets sold out within hours Monday — with about 35 minutes of speeches. To wrap the onstage celebration inside the stadium, Seahawks punter Michael Dickson and others tapped a big keg, and appeared to maybe break it. Lumen Field was then showered with confetti, and the players were off to their parade transportation: U.S. National Guard vehicles, open-bed trucks and double-decker buses.

The first signs of the parade appeared around noon near Fourth Avenue and Olive Way, where the rumbling of helicopters overhead competed with the din of roaring fans, several rows deep. A squad of Seattle police bike patrol officers zoomed by first, a marching band following noisily in their wake.

The crowd screamed louder with every person who passed by: first for a team of Seahawks dancers, their green and silver pompoms flashing. Next for Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who grinned and waved a green flag above her head. And, finally, for Blitz, the team’s mascot, who urged the crowd to cheer louder from his perch atop a van that blasted jets of smoke into the sky.

But the roar reached its crescendo as the coaches, players and their families arrived.

Coach Mike Macdonald thrust the NFC championship trophy into the air, using his other hand to film the screaming fans with his cellphone. Along the route, he spotted 24-year-old Adam Rodriguez holding up a blue and green sign in the crowd. Rodriguez’s sign read “We did not care,” a reference to Macdonald’s now-famous quote after winning the NFC championship. Smiling at the sign, Macdonald proceeded to lead several resounding chants of “We did not care!” with fans.

Vertical ground motion recorded at a University of Washington seismic station based in a building west of Lumen Field.

The players followed, some shaking gold bottles of Champagne and letting the liquid spray onto the street. Quarterback Sam Darnold shouted back at the crowd, pumping his arms up and down.

Some players, like tight end AJ Barner in a fur jacket, immediately got off the bus and walked up to fans, giving high-fives and posing for selfies. Others soon followed, to screams at decibels associated with Bad Bunny or Beyoncé.

“I put my heart into this,” wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba said on KING 5, gesturing to the crowd. “They have my heart.”

Best friends Jalee Apodaca, 25, and Sarah Wegener, 26, of Bremerton, posted up on Fourth Avenue outside City Hall Park at 4 a.m. They were the first ones there.

“I couldn’t have thought of spending a better day with my best friend here, seeing the parade and sharing the love with everyone here,” Wegener said.

They smiled at each other, buried in their blankets.

“Seattle sports are just really inspiring,” said Apodaca, originally from Texas. “Everyone is down for their team.”

Wednesday’s parade would hopefully bring “lit-ness, excitement and joy,” along with a sighting of Smith-Njigba, Eastern Washington University freshman Amanda Frost said.

The 20-year-old from Seattle remembers attending the same parade with her father after the Seahawks’ 2014 Super Bowl win, and still has the commemorative blanket he bought that day to keep her warm. After Sunday’s victory, she cried and texted her father to thank him for “introducing (her) to the best team ever.”

“It was amazing,” Frost said, smiling under watery eyes. “It felt like my childhood come back to life.”

As the parade went on, players known for their loose and focused approach leaned more toward the loose.

“(Fans) deserve this as much as we do,” guard Grey Zabel told a KING 5 reporter, before asking, “Where did his shirt go?” as a shirtless defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence walked past him.

Seattle high school students Vivian Fresenius, 17; Sam Winjum, 18; Noel Humphrey-McLaughlin, 17; and Elliot Bates, 17, made a lucky find on their way to the parade route: A brown leather couch, where the four teens sat comfortably right against the guardrail near Fourth Avenue and Vine Street.

“We found it on the street at 5 a.m. about eight blocks away,” Bates said. “It was sitting in a row with four other couches. We thought, ‘What if we just push it out here?’”

The four teens admitted they would probably leave the couch for another lucky fan to find after the parade. “We’re not bringing this home.”

All the while, strips of blue and green confetti drifted out of the sky.

“They’ll be cleaning this up for years,” one man said, laughing.

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