Very early this morning, the Senate opened the door to a potential return to D.C. by the Commanders. More recently, the NFL has expressed appreciation for the important leverage point in the team’s request to get a new stadium.

“We appreciate the bipartisan group of Congressional leaders who made this important breakthrough possible,” a league spokesman said, via Ben Standig of TheAthletic.com. “Washington D.C. will now have a long-overdue seat at the table when it comes to the location of a new Commanders stadium.”

That’s a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the reality that it’s all about options. And from those options comes the deal that entails the most free money for the league and the Commanders.

It’s the biggest point that has been lost in the back-and-forth between Elon Musk and those who have fact-checked his claim that the current bill entails taxpayer money. Eventually, the NFL and the Commanders will want someone else to pay for at least a big part of the effort.

Even if the D.C. offer never entails a single penny of taxpayer money, having D.C. at the table will make the other potential locations — Maryland and Virginia — more likely to start coughing up the cash.