OAKLAND, Calif. – Everyone said goodbye to Oakland Athletics baseball in their own way on Thursday afternoon.

After 57 seasons in the Coliseum — and decades of indecision and vitriol swirling around the team’s future — the A’s played their final game in Oakland before a huge crowd on a bright and beautiful afternoon in the Bay Area.

The crowd was raucous, the mood was festive and the fans were involved from the first ball. The afternoon started early. The parking lot, which was expected to open at 8 a.m. — more than 4½ hours before the first pitch — instead opened at 7 a.m. after the line of cars waiting to enter the stadium backed up traffic on I-880.

The fans gathered in the lots to cook breakfast, drink beer and alternately sing the chants of “Sell The Team” and “Let’s Go Oakland.” A man who has made a side business of posing as A’s president, Dave Kaval, roamed the parking lot in a suit and tie, without breaking character. If they wanted, fans could have purchased a margarita or psychedelic mushrooms at the small business pop-ups on the pedestrian bridge connecting BART to the Coliseum.

“People who have never been here will look at this scene and be surprised,” said Jorge Leon, a longtime fan of A, the president of the Oakland 68s, a community-based fan group. “For those of us who have been coming here since we were kids, this is exactly what it has always been before everyone got tired of being lied to.”

The A’s announced a deal to move to Las Vegas in April 2023, and last April they announced a three- to four-year stay at a minor league stadium – Sutter Health Park – in West Sacramento, starting next year. The team’s lease at the Coliseum ended Thursday after the finals, and negotiations between the city and the A’s for an extension nearly collapsed before they began.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, who watched the game from a suite at third base, told ESPN. “The people of Oakland deserve better.”

If the arrangement doesn’t work in Sacramento, Thao said, the city would be willing to reconsider bringing the team back.

The team’s departure has not generated much sentiment. Owner John Fisher’s letter to fans ahead of the final series, in which he said he wished he could thank each fan individually, despite years of gutting the team and ignoring the fanbase, was seen by fans as particularly tone-deaf. But on the final day, the team hit some of the right notes: Former A’s pitcher Barry Zito sang the national anthem, and Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson, both Oakland natives and A’s legends, threw out the first pitches.

The A’s took several impromptu team photos in front of their dugout before the game, and the starting nine were greeted with a standing ovation as they took the field. Members of the A’s grounds crew collected dirt for fans along the left field line, and many A’s players did the same.

An hour before the first pitch, Stewart stood next to the “Rickey Henderson Field” logo behind home plate, dark sunglasses shielding the world from the tears in his eyes.

“It’s a tough morning,” Stewart said. “I can’t imagine how we find ourselves in this position.”

Security was beefed up, with 140 Oakland police officers on site, the same as at a Raiders playoff game, but the only real commotion came in the bottom of the ninth, when two fans ran onto the field before being quickly and rudely escorted down the field . stairwell in left field.

After leaving the field, a few objects were thrown onto the field, including some Kelly Green smoke bombs that landed on the warning track in right field. The game was halted repeatedly in the bottom of the ninth.

For the most part, the sold-out crowd of 46,889 spoke their word through chants and gestures. “Let’s Go Oakland” easily turned into “Sell The Team,” but even those seemed relatively half-hearted. The grandstand fencing featured the usual signs — “Goodbye MLB” and “Las Vegas Beware” — with a new addition behind the left-center wall — “It’s Not Us, It’s You.”

“There’s no better city than Oakland to play baseball,” Stewart said. “I’ve witnessed it. I was there in the big days, and this is a great baseball town. No one can ever say this isn’t a great baseball town. The days of the Coliseum are over, but this is a great baseball town.”

A’s manager Mark Kotsay has a habit of writing out his lineup card in his office before passing it to an assistant coach to fill out the official card that hangs in the dugout. Afterwards, Kotsay tears his original card in half lengthwise and places it on his desk.

After Tuesday’s game, a 3-2 victory against the Texas Rangers, a thought struck him: What if this is the last A’s win in Oakland?

His solution: if that were the case, he would frame it anyway, in two pieces.

After the win, which ended when All-Star closer Mason Miller got the Rangers’ Travis Jankowski to ground out to end the game, this was no longer a concern.

Kotsay then addressed the fans, surrounded by his team, as the crowd remained mostly silent as the manager talked about walking back to the field after Wednesday night’s game and letting the moment sink in.

With a thick emotion in his voice, he thanked the stadium employees – “especially those who didn’t come with us” – and ended with a heartfelt tribute to the fans and, as he put it, “this great stadium.”

“I ask you one last time to give us the greatest joy in baseball.”

At that, Kotsay raised his hands as “Let’s Go Oakland” rained down on him.