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About four hours before Sunday's Super Bowl kickoff, fans of all jersey colors appeared to achieve a moment of angry unity while stuck inside a Secaucus, N.J., rail station. The air was stale, the heat had become blistering and the ordeal was going on and on, approaching an hour. 'A.C.! A.C.!' the fans shouted in a plea for cooler conditions as they strained to get a little closer to the connecting trains to MetLife Stadium.

'Welcome to New Jersey,' a police officer said as foot traffic ground to a standstill yet again. He was kidding, sort of.

Billed by organizers as the first 'mass-transit Super Bowl,' Sunday's game drew many visitors to the area's labyrinthine transportation network for the first time. Reviews were decidedly mixed, and there were occasional scenes of large-scale confusion at some of the region's transit hubs.

With parking spaces at the stadium severely restricted for the game, Super Bowl organizers decided to rely heavily on trains and buses, which are normally used on a considerably smaller scale for Jets and Giants games.

As a result, the spotlight shone brightest, for better or worse, on New Jersey Transit, which provides the rail link to the stadium. Crowds boarded en masse at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and traveled to Secaucus Junction, where people were then required to show game tickets before boarding connecting trains to the stadium, which is in East Rutherford.

For a chunk of the afternoon, this crucial train transfer - typically a simple walk through the station - remained uncomfortably tangled, rankling fans unaccustomed to the whims of the transit systems that move many people in and out of New York daily. Eventually, things seemed to smooth out some, but by then, the damage had been done.

'It was an epic fail,' said Joe Knittel, 32, of Seattle, who estimated that he had spent about four hours traveling to the game from Manhattan, through Secaucus.

In the steamy, uncomfortable backup in Secaucus, Karin Rivale, of Aurora, Colo., predicted that she would lose about five pounds before reaching the stadium. As she spoke, people around her began peeling off layers. A burlier fan suggested he might be 20 pounds lighter by the time he reached the stadium.

Several fans wondered aloud what had become of what was supposed to be a historic cold-weather Super Bowl. Other jeers included shouts of 'T.S.A.!' in reference to the federal Transportation Security Administration and its airport security lines, and 'Blame Christie!' a jab at New Jersey's embattled governor.

When one group of stuck fans attempted a call-and-response chant of 'Sea!' and 'Hawks!' a Broncos fan, Matt Budreau, decided to intercede. 'Sea!' the fans said.

'Caucus!' Budreau replied.

Still, by 5 p.m., more than 27,000 people had arrived at the stadium on New Jersey Transit trains, a spokesman said.

And a significantly larger number than that were expected to reach the stadium on buses of various sorts, including several thousand on a temporary bus fleet known as the Fan Express, which allowed people to board at one of nine locations in New York and New Jersey for a $51 round-trip fare. One lane of the Lincoln Tunnel was dedicated exclusively to the buses, whose seats sold out early in the week.

Parking passes were sold for $150 or more, and some were offered on eBay for as much as $350. Ordinarily, they go for $25 to $35.

For the first time in the Super Bowl's history, officials said, there was no drop-off zone for taxis. Pedestrians were also barred from entering the security perimeter, though some cabbies seemed disinclined to inform their passengers: Throughout the afternoon, cabdrivers left dozens of people near the stadium, where the police turned them away, forcing them to then buy seats on shuttle buses in order to get inside the stadium perimeter.

'They're dumping people, 50 or 60 of them here alone,' said Lt. Walter Beese of the Carlstadt police. 'I yelled at one driver. I said, 'Get on your radio and tell all your guys you know you can't do this.' '

But whatever obstacles fans encountered, they did seem to eventually get to MetLife Stadium. According to SP+ Gameday, a company based in Orlando, Fla., that assisted in Super Bowl preparations, more than 54,000 people had passed through magnetometers at the stadium by 4 p.m.

'We were expecting it to take an hour, but it only took 20 minutes,' said Gene Wickes, 61, of Vail, Colo., who joined a group van with his son, Freddy Wickes, 24, on a ride from Midtown Manhattan.

What would happen after the game, when fan travel is typically less staggered, remained to be seen. Even those without tickets to the game often found themselves caught in the game's undertow.

'I have no involvement with the Super Bowl,' Ashley Glaser, 19, a student from Park Ridge, N.J., said to a ticket agent at Penn Station on Sunday afternoon. 'I just want to get home.'