It seems fitting that the most obvious marker of one of the few Baltimore bastions for Washington Commanders fans is not one of pride but of indignation.

There is no team flag flapping outside Wiley Gunter’s, a Fort Avenue bar with a brick façade. But in the window there are stickers — one of the most prominent features Dan Snyder in clown makeup, with the text: “Sell the team.”

Discontent is the typical standard of the bedraggled burgundy-and-gold faithful living in a purple-and-black town. For almost all of his 11 years as the bar’s general manager, Dan Zaranski has seen early excitement fade after six weeks like clockwork. For many NFL teams, mid-October is the heart of the NFL season. For the Commanders, it usually feels like the end.

“It’s been a lot of lows,” said Zaranski, himself a Commanders fan from the Baltimore area. “The lows just kept getting lower, and the highs never got too high.”

But for the past few weeks Wiley Gunter’s hasn’t just been buzzing — it has been positively ecstatic. Sunday’s tilt between the 3-2 Ravens and the 4-1 Commanders is giving Washington fans in this Ravens-crazed city a chance to feel something unfamiliar: hope.

As rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels tore up the Cincinnati Bengals on “Monday Night Football” last month, the bar was “absolute chaos,” setting a standard that Zaranski hopes will last for months to come.

“We were full — upstairs, downstairs, full the entirety of the game,” he said, noting that Washington fans typically head home at halftime on Monday nights. “They were hanging out after and just couldn’t believe what was happening. It was jubilant.”

Being a Commanders fan the last few decades has largely been anything but jubilant.

When the Ravens first played their Southern neighbors in 1997, Washington was the franchise with a proud history and Super Bowl trophies to spare. Since then, the Ravens have mostly hoarded the success in this region. Under John Harbaugh, the Ravens have won 59 more regular-season games than Washington and won a Super Bowl. In the same span, the Commanders have lost all three playoff games in which they’ve appeared and have cycled through five head coaches (and three team names).

The last truly bright moment for the Washington franchise came in 2012, when rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III appeared to light the way to glory with a 10-6 campaign. But his season was cut short in a game against the Ravens, as fortune would have it, when his right knee bent the wrong way in a collision with Haloti Ngata. It was the start of a spectacular decline for Griffin, and Washington hasn’t won more than nine games in a season since.

It’s that kind of cursed history that has 50-year-old Darren Wolfe, a Canton resident who founded the fan group Charm City Hailers, still guarded.

“There’s a part of me that’s a little nervous for this weekend, because we had similar excitement for RGIII,” he said. “Hopefully, we don’t have the same outcome.”

While Sunday’s game offers a tantalizing match between two of the NFL’s best quarterbacks and competitive teams this season, talk of a rivalry between two teams (who have met seven times total, with the Ravens sporting a 4-3 edge) was met with largely blank expressions at the Ravens’ training facility this week. Safety Kyle Hamilton admitted facing the Commanders doesn’t rise to the level of a conference game but diplomatically offered, “I guess there is the ‘Beltway Rivalry.’”

Wolfe hasn’t seen much evidence of a rivalry himself. He grew up idolizing Joe Theismann and the Super Bowl teams of 1982, ’87 and ’91. But since the mid-’90s, the two franchises have gone opposite directions.

“They [the Ravens] kind of exemplify running an organization with class and winning,” he said. “My team is more synonymous with ineptitude, scandal and negativity.”

Wolfe has watched Washington football games on the upper floor of Canton bar El Bufalo since moving to Baltimore in 2016 (he met his wife, Shanan, a Ravens fan, at one of these gatherings). In a town with large Eagles and Bills fan bases, being a Commanders fan just up the road from Landover can feel like being “a second-class citizen.”

Though most of his local friends are Ravens fans, “I kind of secretly root against the Ravens often, to be honest,” he admitted.

In some of the low points of the franchise, including scandal-plagued final years under Snyder, Wiley Gunter’s faced external pressure to cater to other fan bases such as the sizable Philly contingent. But loyalty to Washington, somehow, has persisted, even across decades of disappointment. Zaranski said they never truly considered it.

“We have a very solid core, thick and thin, who still come out,” he said. “We see people coming in now with their families to watch the games who first came in when they were 22 or 23 years old. We were never gonna displace those people. We figured, ‘It can’t be bad forever.’”

Over the last two years, that faith has been repaid. Last year, Wiley Gunter’s had one of its busiest weeks when Snyder finally sold the franchise to an ownership group led by Josh Harris. This year’s hot start has one of the region’s largest fan bases stirring to action and traveling north. As of Thursday evening, the cheapest Ravens-Commanders ticket prices on the secondary market had soared to more than $260.

Wiley Gunter’s will open Sunday at 11 a.m., prepared to greet a stream of giddy fans to fill both its floors before kickoff at M&T Bank Stadium.

“Hopefully the afterparty ends up here,” Zaranski said, “one way or the other.”

Wolfe has two tickets to the game, a seat in the lion’s den surrounded by the same fans whose joy has only added to his own discontent. He’s seen too much bad football in the last 30-odd years to put all of his faith in these Commanders, describing himself as “one level above cautiously optimistic.”

But it feels different than the last time, Wolfe said, which might make it easier to keep riding the wave if the Commanders do, in fact, win Sunday.

“You watch the video of the locker room celebrations, and it feels like there’s definitely a different feeling. You can see everyone’s confidence getting higher and higher,” he said. “If they win, I’m gonna be more willing to talk smack and flex a little bit.”

It’s more than most Washington fans in this town have been willing to do in a long, long time.