This forms the basis of what's wrong with scientific funding imo. Saying that it's ok to be disappointed because they did not 'discover' is like equating science to a sport and winning a medal- that analogy is fundamentally wrong.

Performing scientific experiments is not about winning first place, it's about creating abstractions/ models in order to achieve deeper insight. As such failing to find that your model is wrong is not like loosing a race. Ex: a bunch of fantastic physics was discovered and described with Newtonian mechanics , though inherently that model is flawed, it took a while to realize it.