Need the be able to use Vaadin Router without modifying window.location. Po

I’m experimenting with using the vaadin router for a Polymer app. The sample app is working great but I need to be able to handle routing entirely through code without modifying the browser URL (yes, I know that pretty much defeats the entire purpose of routing to begin with but in this application we don’t control the parent page so we need to be able to isolate internal routing from user interaction with the host site). Is there any way to do that using vaadin router? Alternately we could manage routes using the hash (#) portion of the URL but I was not able to get any route patterns to match using the hash. Any suggestions would be appreciated - thanks!