That was a cheerful start! Luckily, the next person I ran into was David Goodman, a longtime reader. He had slightly less angst.

“They’re so bad, and they’ve been so bad for so long, that I just don’t care,” he said. “I care more now about the Washington Valor than the Washington Wizards.”

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A few minutes later, I ran into another reader, Jacob Press. He’s a season-ticket holder, with two upper-level seats to all 41 games.

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“I can’t even find anybody to take with me,” he said. “I had a guy who I shared tickets with, and he cut out on me because he wanted to buy five-dollar tickets on StubHub. . . . You want to go to a game sometime, let me know.”

So at least I made a new friend out of the assignment. Fahrenthold should be so lucky.

Now, it’s easy enough to find a few disaffected grumps in any arena. Several fans I stopped were still filled with hope and joy (really). And you can reasonably accuse me of being a cynical crank, especially since the red-hot Wizards are now winners of two out of three. Monday night’s showing — with a star turn from Bradley Beal and a closing run from John Wall — is the kind of performance we expected from what was supposed to be one of the league’s best back courts. Plus, Ian Mahinmi is getting healthy. Good luck finding five more exciting words than those.

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Still, this feels like a precarious moment for Washington’s most trod-upon fan base. Last season was a disappointment. So was last offseason. Washington almost landed Al Horford, but that’s not like almost winning a playoff series or almost winning a title. There’s no momentum from flirting with a big free agent, nothing to grab on to, no jolt of energy.

A good start to the season might have erased that disappointment. The Wizards have had the opposite. They already have lost to two of the East’s bottom-feeders. The injury-prone Beal, after landing his max deal, already has missed three games because of injury. Coach Scott Brooks has opened his Wizards tenure at 4-9, echoing the tenure-starting slogs of Gar Heard (4-9), Leonard Hamilton (3-10), Doug Collins (3-10) and Flip Saunders (4-9). For those men, early-season struggles transitioned into midseason struggles, before concluding with late-season struggles. It all means a team that sometimes lacks for local relevance again feels coated with interest-repellent.

“I love basketball,” said Stephen Eberhardt, a Wizards die-hard whose passion hasn’t waned. “But for some of my friends, they’re more casual fans, and they’re already checked out.”

That’s not supposed to happen before Thanksgiving. But there were dozens of $6 seats to Monday night’s game available on the secondary market. At that price, if you win a free fourth-quarter chicken sandwich, you’ve almost broken even. Yes, that’s a Monday night, before Thanksgiving, against a bad opponent with a negligible following. But the Wizards are now 27th out of 30 NBA teams in the percentage of seats filled and 25th in total attendance.

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Anyhow, you don’t really need attendance numbers to sense that fans are asking deep questions. Did this version of the franchise already peak with the “I called game” moment two years ago? Are we gearing up for another season-long quest to reach .500? Will the Wizards — who haven’t won 47 games since the invention of the Internet — win 47 games again before humanity goes extinct, which Stephen Hawking estimates could happen in just 1,000 more years? Could Verizon Center maybe create some safe spaces, free of scoreboards? You know that right track-wrong direction question pollsters always mention during election cycles? How do you reckon Wizards fans would now respond?

“I think that there’s a small group of people who exhibit their angst on social media,” owner Ted Leonsis said before the season, when I told him I sensed fan distress. “It’s why I never listen to somebody who says, ‘I think I’m speaking for the fan base here.’ You can’t speak for the fan base. You can speak for yourself, right? So let’s see how we do.”

It’s a fair point. All I have is anecdotal angst from a few friends and acquaintances. Leonsis said the team’s season-ticket renewals were strong. And it’s probably a good thing when an owner exhibits far more patience than his fans. I just hear sadness more than hope, indifference more than passion. I hear fans talking about how easily they can hear the sound of the bouncing basketball in their 400-level seats, and worrying that the grander arc of the franchise is returning to its historical norm.

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“Oh, it’s hopeless,” said Press, who said he already is asking himself why he renewed his season tickets. (At least he’s persuaded his girlfriend to use his extra ticket for one game each month, so long as they visit the Dippin’ Dots vendor on the lower concourse.)

“Some people were saying with Paul Pierce we were good enough to maybe go to the Finals,” said Nicholas Bowie, a 23-year-old fan. “Now you’re just going the opposite way, man. It’s not good leadership, from all the way up to all the way down.”

The Caps, Nats and Redskins are all defending divisional champs. The Wizards last won a division title in 1979. Thirteen games is way too early to lose your patience. But 37 years is a pretty good stretch. There’s nothing to do now but try to win with this roster — to hope that Beal stays healthy, Otto Porter Jr. continues to blossom, Mahinmi shores up the bench and the slow start fades away. I’m just sensing a fan base teetering between apathy and fury; see Monday night’s mixture of a near-empty upper deck with a sign of protest in the lower level.

Either way, this is all too overwrought. Sports aren’t that serious. If the Wizards win, fans will be fine. If they lose, well, fans are used to that. And even the struggles contain little nuggets of happiness.

“I love the Wizards, but do I think they’ll be good in the next 10 years? Not really,” Jimmy Metzler said. “It makes it hard, but at the same time, I like that it keeps ticket prices low. You can take a girl out and you don’t look like a total cheapskate.”