SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The hanging lanterns of a historic Chinatown. The Golden Gate Bridge. Victorian homes famous for their sherbet hues.

The fan entrance to Levi’s Stadium, which will host the Super Bowl on Sunday, has for days been plastered with these iconic images.

Of a city 45 miles away.

The stadium is actually in Santa Clara, a mostly landlocked suburb of 133,000 people best known as the home of major tech companies, including Nvidia and Intel. But much of the marketing and fan events for the big game have celebrated San Francisco, the picturesque anchor of the Bay Area that draws outsize political attention and the bulk of the region’s tourists.

Santa Clara residents seem largely accustomed to being the forgotten little sibling, regularly overshadowed not just by San Francisco but also by neighboring San Jose, the most populous city in Northern California, and by the broader Silicon Valley. After all, the team that plays in Levi’s Stadium is known as the San Francisco 49ers.

“You hear about all these events going on down in San Francisco, in San Jose — every place but Santa Clara, where they’re going to have the game,” said Gary Morihata, 78, who lives across the street from the stadium.

Santa Clara is one of the oldest cities in California, founded in 1777 with a Spanish mission that was built just a year after the one in San Francisco. The city is also home to Santa Clara University, established in 1851, one of the oldest colleges on the West Coast and the alma mater of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

It was long known for its bounty of prunes, apricots and other fruit through the middle of the 20th century, when the Santa Clara Valley was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

And it was once appealing for being more affordable than the rest of the Bay Area. But then the region transformed into Silicon Valley, drawing increasingly wealthy workers who wanted short commutes to the nearby campuses of tech companies, including Intel, Google and Apple.

Today, it is a city of gray office buildings and well-maintained parks planted with redwoods. Surrounded by San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino, it’s a place where small, one-story homes now sell for well over $1 million.

“Santa Clara never really built its identity in being interesting to outsiders,” said Bob Staedler, a local business consultant. “It’s always been kind of quietly, behind-the-scenes, a great place to live, really well-run.”

Despite the love showered on San Francisco, locals still feel pride that their city is hosting the nation’s biggest sporting event — for the second time. The Super Bowl first came to Santa Clara in 2016, two years after Levi’s Stadium was built there to be a home for the San Francisco 49ers.

John Park, a family medicine doctor who lives in Santa Clara and grew up in the Boston area, wore a Patriots jersey as he worked on a laptop this week at a Starbucks surrounded by tech workers taking virtual meetings.

Park, 36, said he had worked extra shifts to buy a ticket to Sunday’s game, which will be a 40-minute walk from his house — that beats sitting in traffic and a parking lot.

“It kind of feels surreal,” Park said. “It’s really a dream come true.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Soumya Karlamangla/Minh Connors