The Galactic Center Excess, GeV emission peaking near 2 GeV and extending 10 degrees, spent a decade as ΛCDM's best dark matter annihilation candidate. The statistics have turned: the emission is clumpy, tracks the boxy stellar bulge rather than a spherical halo (Macias et al.), and the matching WIMP space is excluded by direct detection and dwarf-spheroidal nulls. The model is left choosing between an uncounted millisecond pulsar population and a particle that annihilates only where it cannot be checked.
A thermal-relic particle should annihilate brightest where dark matter is densest, making the Galactic Center the flagship target and the excess a natural claim. The assumption converts every diffuse residual into a potential detection, then forces evasive parameter gymnastics when the cleaner targets, dwarfs and direct detection, return nothing.
SCT removes the annihilation channel absolutely: no dark matter particle exists, so the excess must be astrophysical, and the framework registered that requirement before the morphology data arrived (P54). The bulge-tracking, clumpy character of the emission is the predicted signature, because the source population follows the stars. SCT also supplies the population with unusual ease: collision seeding produces compact-object populations early and abundantly (P46), and the pre-existing matter context (P25) gives the old bulge a deep inventory of recycled stellar remnants, so thousands of bulge millisecond pulsars are a natural census, not a rescue hypothesis invented for the excess.
The asymmetric stakes are the point: ΛCDM can survive either attribution, but SCT cannot survive the annihilation one, making the Galactic Center a genuine falsification arena rather than an interpretive preference. Every swing of the statistics toward stellar tracers, every dwarf-spheroidal null, and every direct-detection exclusion is the universe repeatedly endorsing the no-particle ledger.
This is the same universal-null stance behind the 3.5 keV deflation and the positron excess attribution. There is no need to invoke a particle that performs only at the most confused sightline in the sky.
The registered kill: confirmation of the annihilation origin, a smooth spherical component irreducible to point sources with the spectral and morphological scaling annihilation requires, or a correlated signal at the same particle mass from dwarf spheroidals, would be a dark matter detection and would falsify SCT outright. Conversely the pulsar inventory is checkable: MeerKAT and SKA failing to find the required bulge millisecond pulsar population at radio wavelengths would strain the astrophysical reading SCT mandates.