Photo by Paul Frederiksen.

Gotta give it to the folks who own D.C. United—they’re a patient bunch. Team officials have both put up with playing in RFK Stadium and waiting on D.C. officials to work out a land deal for a new stadium for years, but it seems that their patience is now slightly wearing thin.

The Post reports today that unnamed team sources have said that while they’re hoping to finalize a deal for a stadium site near Nationals Park, they’ve also started reconsidering building a stadium in Maryland:

Although D.C. United remains optimistic about reaching an agreement to build a stadium at Buzzard Point in Washington, the MLS club has taken renewed interest in Maryland, sources close to the situation told the Insider.

United executives are “going to play it out with D.C. first, but patience is thinner than it was six months ago,” said one person, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

While the team had considered a number of sites in Maryland in the past (it even considered one in Virginia), last year it seemed like D.C. had offered up a winning deal—an unused plot of land in Southwest D.C. that the team could use to build a new 20,000-seat stadium on. And unlike the baseball stadium nearby, team officials said they’d pick up the tab for the $157 million facility, expecting only that D.C. help acquire the land and cover the costs of infrastructure improvements. (D.C. did the same with the Verizon Center.) Since then, though, there haven’t been any significant developments.

According to the Post article, team officials want to see progress made by this summer and the land purchased from Pepco and developer Akridge by the end of the year.

It goes without saying: when a team wants to pay for a stadium, they have to discretely threaten D.C. to get what few concessions would make it possible. But if they demand that the city invest $1 billion in public funds in that stadium—ahem, Nats and MLB—D.C. officials will all but raze an entire neighborhood for that very purpose.