WASHINGTON, D.C. — They came from the hardscrabble streets of America’s inner cities, from suburban cul-de-sacs stretched thin by the country’s staggering economy. They came from college towns and rust-belt communities, from red states and blue.

More than a million — some said two — gathered in the nation’s capitol this week to see the end of an unlikely journey that catapulted Illinois Sen. Barack Obama into the White House, the first African American president in the country’s 233 years of existence.

It was an emotional pilgrimage for many.

“I just had to be here to witness a dream come true,” said Linda Brown of Houston, Texas. “I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.”

She said her siblings, nieces and nephews were ecstatic when they found out she was going to the inauguration. “I had to be here as a witness for my family, if nothing else.”

“It’s a profound moment,” said Brown, the CEO of a commutations consulting company in Texas.

A self-described “political junkie,” Brown worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She turned to Obama after the primary when the party came together, she said.

“He’s the anointed one for such a time as this,” Brown said.

“Regardless of the experience he’s had, or doesn’t have, and the exposure he had or didn’t have. He was the chosen one. So all those other things didn’t matter.”

Like others in the mob of millions on the National Mall, Brown said her own expedition to the inauguration started the night before.

“I didn’t sleep at all.

I couldn’t sleep. Just too much anticipation,” she said.

Paula Bennett left Toledo, Ohio at 10:30 the night before the inauguration, driving eight hours in her Ford, a convertible nicknamed “Mustang Sally,” with her granddaughter Julia King.

She said she ignored the speed limit and drove straight through. She got lost once.

She got her ticket a week ago. Just one. Her goddaughter was not daunted. She saw Obama during a campaign stop at the University of Toledo where she goes to school and was determined to see him again.

“He makes me speechless,” King said.

The election was the first for both.

“I felt like a grown-up. I felt mature and responsible, like I was making a change,” King said.

Bennett recalled how she watched the vote returns come in on Election Night, but fell asleep.

“When I woke up, the TV was on mute, but the words on the bottom of the screen said ‘Obama takes the White House.’ I just started crying.”

“I was so glad my grandma was around to see it,” added King as the pair stood in the below-freezing early morning outside the “blue gate,” just south of the Capitol on Independence Avenue, with several thousand other ticket holders.

King called her grandmother when she first got to Washington and saw the Capitol. She said she was crying, but her grandma couldn’t come to the phone.

“She was in the tub,” King laughed.

The inauguration of Obama as the 44th president was an inspiration, many said.

“I’m just proud,” Bennett said. “I have two sons. I want them to know they can be president. It doesn’t stop at basketball.”

“It means a lot,” added King. “A lot of people say you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, but now that we have a black man in the White House, it proves to all African Americans, and everybody else, that anybody can be what they set out to be. I could be another Johnny Cochrane,” she said.

Robert Little boarded a bus just after 3:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Greyhound terminal in Baltimore, the one near Camden Yard, with his wife Heather and 5-year-old son Orion.

They waited with a group of 50 or so people, who got partly through watching the movie “Ali” before the bus loaded early; the family got seats at the very back of the bus as it filled quickly.

It left the lot with a crescent moon near the horizon and the remnants of Baltimore’s first snow of the winter on streets and cars.

The bus driver on Little’s bus, Number 1001, stopped his bus in the middle of the street about a half block out of the station.

He got up and stepped center aisle, and said his microphone was broken but he had something to say anyway.

“My name is Carter and I just wanted to say thank you for riding Greyhound on this mighty fine day!”

“And no drinking, no smoking and no talking on your cell phone,” a woman sitting about mid-bus shouted, to laughs from others aboard.

Carter put the bus in drive and passengers started to shout “Obama! Obama!”

It was an hour drive in the dark, with not much to look at until the bus was upon the capital, passing a lighted billboard by the Washington Times that blinked “Inaugural emotions sweeps nation” before flicking over to a headline about the $170 million cost of the inaugural party.

Little said they got up at 1:45 a.m. and caught a cab to the bus station.

“We just thought it was an important part of history,” he said.

There was another reason, too, Little said. “I just feel like the last eight years have been so much against the working people.”

“I was a fan of his from the beginning,” said Heather Little.

“I like everything about him.”

She teaches at a school for pregnant teenagers. He works in the engine shop for American Airlines.

He lit up when he talked about the joy he’d seen in others’ faces when they talked about Obama becoming president. Reaction back home in Tulsa, Okla. was a bit different, Little said, noting how the state was one of a handful of southern states west of the Mississippi that went for John McCain.

Claire Newman, a student at Boston University, got to her ticket gate next to the Capitol before security personnel set up a line for blue ticket holders.

She had planned to sleep on the sidewalk.

But by 5 a.m, a large crowd had formed. When her friend, Catherine, started to leave to use a PortaPotty, police told the crowd it would have to wait inside a set of barricades so a new line could be set up.

“Everybody started sprinting and jumping over these fences to get into the pen, and I was just left there,” she said.

Newman came to the inauguration without tickets along with a busload of other Boston University students.

She was eating a bacon cheeseburger at a restaurant called Busboys and Poets on Monday night when a woman from the Presidential Inaugural Committee came in and asked her group if they had tickets.

Newman said the woman, who was wearing a badge, said they had picked three places in the capital at random to hand out tickets.

They got three tickets for the “blue standing” section, directly behind the chairs of seated guests.

“We started giggling and all whipped out our phones and started calling everybody,” Newman said.

“We were all going to stand on the Mall and watch the video screen,” she said.

“It was my first election, and I just found it very important,” said Newman, who voted by absentee in her home state of Ohio.

“I thought it would be such a historic thing to witness, even from afar,” she said.

Sonja Runberg of Eugene, Ore. was attending her second inauguration. She was with her son, Corey, a college student at Portland State in Portland, Ore., her sister Kirstin Runberg Platt, and her sister’s son Erik, from Yorktown, Va.

“He’s a non-cookie-cutter president,” Runberg said.

“He’s non-Caucasian, not from a quote-unquote normal family, no military experience and he talks so people can understand him. And he’s open to other people’s opinions, even if he doesn’t share them.

“Out of all those, he’s not Caucasian and I’d never thought I’d be alive to see this,” she said.

Runberg tried to get tickets from three members of Congress from Oregon; two replied, saying they had a lottery for handing out tickets and she lost.

She went to an open house held by Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon on Monday morning, and asked again. Still nothing. But someone said call back in the afternoon, and as luck would have it, they were visiting the FDR Memorial and got a call. Four tickets were theirs.

“First thing I said was, ‘What kind of chocolate do you like?’”

“I was going to stand on the Mall. I decided to go when I saw the returns come in, even if I had to stand on the Lincoln Memorial,” she said. “I was going to come.”

She and her sister came to President Carter’s inauguration 31 years earlier. She figured they would be in nearly the same spot, with the weather just as cold as that inaugural day back when they were kids when their parents dragged them out of bed and made them stand for hours and hours in the cold.

“We do it to our kids now,” she laughed.

“The country has been going the wrong direction for a while now,” said Runberg Platt, her younger sister.

“America used to be more prominent. Our overseas relations need to be improved, and we need to make sure we don’t leave our children with a country that’s not strong.”

“I see this as a positive change, and it’s all of our responsibilities to get us back where we were,” she said.

Joshua Brown, a teacher from Indianola, Iowa, said he came to witness the end of a campaign that started in his home state.

“I’ve been a part of it for the past three years with caucuses in Iowa. I feel like seeing it to the end,” he said.

He teaches civics, and got a ticket through the lottery in Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office.

“It’s going to be a very historic event and I’ll be able to talk with my students for a long time about it,” Brown said.

The school district offered any teacher with a ticket time off to go, and Brown said he was probably the only one who actually qualified.

Brown originally supported John Edwards, but switched to Obama after he won Iowa and Clinton took New Hampshire. He helped with the campaign by blogging and writing letters to others in states where caucuses had not yet been held.

“I appreciate his message of change and hope,” he said.

“You can feel that something important is happening here,” Brown said.

He got in line at 3 a.m. at the blue gate.

“I considered going to the bar, since they closed at 4, but I decided to get some sleep instead,” he said.

Showing up early proved to be a smart move. Many with tickets at the blue gate, and even more at the purple gate on the east side of the Mall’s Reflecting Pool, were not admitted.

Inauguration officials later said the unprecedented size of the crowd, and the large number of people without tickets who crowded into the Third Street Tunnel from the Mall, prevented those with tickets from getting in.

Some of those with purple tickets came to the blue gate and tried unsuccessfully to get in; others offered to swap their purple tickets for blue — without mentioning that the purple access gate had been closed — but found no takers.

When the gates opened about 8 a.m., many ran after passing through security to get as close as possible.

One teenager threw a blanket on the ground next to a barricade directly behind the seated section, and laid spread eagle across it to save room for slower friends. When one arrived, he asked her to save more room along the fence in the same fashion.

“Starfish! Starfish!” he told her. She laughed at his advice, and stayed standing.

Standing-room only areas filled up fast, and many turned their eyes to the Capitol steps as elected officials and other dignitaries arrived.

Angel Akinbinu of Maryland watched a JumboTron as Sen. John McCain took his place in the audience.

She was glad he was with his Senate colleagues, and not at center stage.

“I wouldn’t even be here. I’d be at work, wearing black,” she said.

The crowd was partisan at times. A chorus of catcalls and boos rang out when President Bush appeared on the big screen, and Sen. Joe Lieberman was loudly booed each time he appeared on the 10 JumboTrons spread out across the Mall. Scattered shouts of “Traitor!” could be heard.

There were big cheers for Colin Powell, however, and shouts of “Teddy! Teddy!” when Sen. Ted Kennedy walked into view.

Loudest, however, were the roars of approval for Obama’s daughters Malia and Sasha, and the president-elect.

Obama took the oath at 12:04 p.m., his right hand resting on the same Bible that President Lincoln used at his first inauguration, and the massive crowd stood in hushed reverence as Obama delivered his inaugural address.

He called out to a nation in crisis.

“Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

“Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.

“Our capacity remains undiminished,” Obama continued. “But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Many said they were ready, including Brown, the visitor from Texas.

“He can’t do it by himself,” she said. “We have to execute the change. He’s going to lead the way, but we’re going to help him make the change.”