Few problems in physics are as tantalising or as humbling as dark matter, the unseen substance thought to outweigh all the ordinary matter in the cosmos several times over.
It announces itself only through gravity, sculpting the rotation of galaxies and bending starlight, while eluding every attempt at direct capture.
The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, buried beneath a mountain of rock to insulate it from cosmic and terrestrial interference, represents one of the most sensitive attempts yet to feel the touch of a dark matter particle.
In its latest run the detector flagged a rare interaction that stubbornly defies reclassification as prosaic background noise.
More provocatively still, the event materialised in the precise corner of parameter space where several leading models predict a dark matter candidate should lurk.
And yet the collaboration has greeted the result with studied sobriety rather than triumphant proclamation.
The annals of particle physics are strewn with seductive anomalies that evaporated once scrutinised, and the team is acutely aware of that history.
They stress that nothing short of a markedly larger, statistically robust dataset could transmute this intriguing flicker into a bona fide discovery.
Until then, the signal remains a whisper worth chasing but far too soon to celebrate.