While the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland gets all the press, the search for the elusive Higgs boson has actually been a race between two particle colliders. Now it seems the underdog collider, the Tevatron in Illinois, may have found a signal: The New York Times reports that Tevatron data appears to harbor a hint of the Higgs—the rogue particle theorized to endow all things with mass.

The signal, in data collected over the last several years at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator, agrees roughly with results announced last December from two independent experimental groups working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, outside Geneva.

“Based on the current Tevatron data and results compiled through December 2011 by other experiments, this is the strongest hint of the existence of a Higgs boson,” said the report, which will be presented on Wednesday by Wade Fisher of Michigan State University to a physics conference in La Thuile, Italy.

What are researchers expecting to see when the Higgs is found? Physicist Monica Dunford, one of the scientists working at the LHC’s ATLAS detector, explains:

Read more about the Tevatron accelerator and the stateside search for the Higgs boson at the NY Times.