From the article's description it sounds like they tortured the data until it told them what they wanted. If the charm did show up, how long did it exist? In conventional spectroscopy, the broader the line, the shorter the lifetime (and v.v.) It smells like a sub-attosecond lifetime, if that.
It was a bit of an open question what would happen with the heavy charm quarks, given that they each mass more than the entire proton, but yeah... anything else would have been a major surprise.