Monday's Rose Bowl was one of the hottest tickets of any college bowl game this year, ending in Penn State's wild 52-49 loss to No. 9 Southern California.

A decent-sized contingent of Penn State fans from Carbon County were lucky enough to get tickets to see their team play in the historic game known as the "Grandaddy of them all.""It's been very nice. I'm out here with about 150,000 of my personal friends," Chip Solt of Palmerton joked. "This place is saturated with Penn State fans."Penn State sold out its allotment of 20,000 tickets less than two days after it was announced that the Nittany Lions would be playing in the Rose Bowl.That sounds like a lot, but it's a small number when you consider that 100,000 people attend the average game at Beaver Stadium.Weatherly native Caite Lesko, a 2014 PSU graduate, was still in Indianapolis the day after Penn State beat Wisconsin for the Big Ten championship when she started looking for tickets. She and her fiance found tickets on StubHub and booked a hotel about an hour from the stadium."We're both PSU alumni, and it's something to check off our bucket list. We also love traveling," she said.The gameday experience has been slightly different for fans like Lesko, who spent the past couple days checking out Venice Beach and Santa Monica. While there are fewer RVs and cornhole boards, Penn State fans are still making it their own."Yesterday we were at Staples Center for a pep rally where my fiance's sister played," she said. "That was a little bit of Happy Valley in L.A."Lehighton Area High School graduate Dedan Brozino gets to experience the Rose Bowl every year as the executive director of the company that operates the Rose Bowl.He said that this year's matchup seemed to be gaining more attention than the average Rose Bowl game, in part because of the upward trajectory that both Penn State and USC seem to be on."For a (nonplayoff) game, the excitement around the city and the region has been pretty special. I just left a tailgate area - Penn State has a 3,500 person tailgate set up, and USC has a huge tent, so it's a little like the circus has come to town," Brozino said.When he pulled in the parking lot at 5:30 a.m. Monday, tailgaters had already begun their preparations more than nine hours before the game. Part of that is the early start for the famous Tournament of Roses Parade, which he said is a must-see for fans attending the Rose Bowl."It's America's New Year's celebration, and it's something that fans take seriously, also like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he said.Solt said that Penn State fans were well-represented at all the events leading up to the game, including the parade. They woke up at 4:45 a.m. Pacific time to get an up-close look at the floats set to participate in the parade."The thing you can't appreciate on TV is that every single square inch of that float is covered with organic material," he said.Solt, who is a relative of Brozino, was planning to attend the game this year regardless of who was playing, so Penn State's berth was just icing on the cake."We couldn't be happier with the Penn State team this year," he said.