This piece is an extract from yesterday's Dens Dispatch newsletter, which is emailed out at 6pm every Tuesday.

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The tank. The crossword. The Panama Canal. Stainless steel. Cheeseburgers. Television. The 40-hour working week. Pluto. Fortune cookies. Daylight Saving Time. Insulin and penicillin. The RAF. Fridges. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Hellman’s Mayonnaise. Bubblegum. The Titanic. Women’s suffrage in the UK. The American states of New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii.

If you were to clamber into your Time Machine and mention these to any of the 24,000 or so spectators at Ibrox on 20 April 1910, they’d give you a puzzled look, as they were all yet to be discovered or even exist. Technically, it was still the short-lived Edwardian era, with Queen Victoria only nine years dead and the Boer War not long over; Irish home rule was bubbling up on the political agenda, as were the tensions that would lead to the outbreak of WW1 and fire the starting gun on a century of conflict, progress and discovery. However, if you told the spectators that this wild rollercoaster of inventions and events would not and could not include another instance of the Scottish Cup being hoisted high by the Dark Blues for at least 114 years, they’d have likely huckled you out of the ground and sought medical attention.

Readers of this column will likely need no reminder of this hoodoo, of tales of curses brought about by displaying the trophy in the window of a club director who also happened to be the local undertaker or the ever-increasing sense of a missed opportunity to lift this albatross around our shoulders against a punch-drunk Rangers in 2003. At the tender age of 14, I left Hampden that day believing that our day would come soon. You would think the following twenty years of trophy disappointment would teach me to be less optimistic, wouldn’t you?

Well, none of us support Dundee on the basis of common sense, me included, and so all I can think is that this year’s competition is as good a chance as any to make our mark. A tough fourth round tie away to Killie wasn’t what any of us wanted, but as we don’t have the good fortune of Celtic or Rangers, we can’t bank on a soft draw paving the way to Mount Florida in May. To be the best, you have to beat the best, but we’ve not even been able to beat the mediocre half the time.

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A masochistic friend of mine lovingly maintains what he calls “the spreadsheet of doom”, detailing the many new and exciting ways we’ve managed to crash out of the Scottish Cup in his lifetime. Alongside three exits in a row at the hands of our neighbours as the Soviet Union collapsed (oh, there’s another thing that didn’t exist when we last lifted the Cup) sit eleven replay defeats, a semi final loss to Gretna, a quarter final home defeat to Raith Rovers, and no less than three knockout blows delivered by Queen of the South. We’ve yet to even get to Hampden for a semi final since YouTube was one year old, so if anything, we seem to be retreating further and further.

We are not the only club to go through what can be euphemistically described as a barren spell in Scotland’s most famous tournament. As fate would have it, Hibs also waited 114 years between cup triumphs until they threw off their own curse in 2016 against a lacklustre Rangers side. David Gray wrote himself into Leith folklore on that sunny day with a late, late winner, sparking scenes of chaotic celebrations that lasted days, if not weeks. The years between were not kind to Hibs, who had to thole countless indignities, not least a hammering in the 2012 final to their bitter city rivals.

Yet, ask most Hibs fans if they’d trade their day of reckoning against Rangers for more victories in the preceding years and they’d say no. As the purveyors of the black stuff tell us (151 years old when we last won the Cup - finally, something older!), good things come to those who wait, and Dundee fans have done far more than our fair share of waiting.

I do sometimes wonder how we’d process victory if we actually lifted the trophy. Like our green and white friends from Leith, cup misery has become engrained and, dare I say it, expected. The mere idea of consigning “1910 never again” to the dustbin, twitter feeds full of hastily inscribed tattoos to mark the victory and innumerable testy households demanding the return of otherwise responsible dark blue parents from a fourth day straight on the town is difficult to comprehend. Like a dog chasing a car (horse-drawn carriages were still in use when we…okay, you get the picture), what would we do if we actually caught it?

Our season won’t be defined by the Scottish Cup - continuing to not only survive but thrive in the top tier is pleasant enough for us - but by god, would a cup run get the heart pumping. The romance of the cup, no matter how unrequited the love may be, does not die easily, even after 114 years of hurt. If the trophy is ready to end the will they won't they and say I do, then so are we. We might even throw in another trip on a horse-drawn carriage.