The Galactic Center excess brought down-to-earth.

There is evidence for a spherical-symmetric diffuse gamma-ray signal peaked in the Galactic Center (GC) region and extended up to several degrees off the GC. We critically review some relevant points regarding the derivation of this signal by means of the template-fitting method. In particular we turn our attention to the Inverse Compton (IC) template usually adopted for the background emission, and we show that it does not provide a realistic description of the complex GC environment. Driven by the evidence of a large gas density in the inner kpc of the Galaxy correlated with an impressive Supernova rate (2 order of magnitude larger than the Galactic average), and therefore with ongoing CR acceleration, we show that the template-fitting algorithm does not show any clear evidence of the aforementioned excess if a realistic modification in the diffuse CR source term is implemented.