Forget objectivity, I have to admit that watching Adam Scott sink his birdie putt on No. 10 to win the Masters was one of my happiest moments as a golf fan.

Seriously, I got off my couch and let out a “yes!” To the best of my recollection, I’ve only done that one other time in my entire sports-fan career — after Sidney Crosby’s gold medal-winning goal during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

After the Scott incident, my wife, who was sitting on the chair 10 feet away, gave me the typical look:

“What are you so happy about, it’s just a sport.”

And so I turned to her and said, “You don’t understand, it’s Adam Scott. Everyone loves Adam Scott, and this is BIG.”

It was big. Winning a major is a necessary part of any top golfer’s resume, for better or for worse. Majors hang over a player’s head like a quarterback without a Super Bowl, or a sprinter without an Olympic gold. Majors are the first thing that will will come up in any debate about skill, both during a golfer’s career and after he has retired.

So when Adam Scott, who has 20 wins as a pro, finally got the monkey off his back at Augusta, his legacy as a golfer changed. He went from “20-some wins” to “20-some wins and a major.” That’s the difference between an “underachiever” and “one of the best players of his era.”

So who stands the best chance of joining Scott as the next player to get the major monkey off his back?

First, we are going to explore those that have suffered a bit in major championships. What we’re looking for here are veterans who’ve racked up a few wins, but who still find major championships eluding them. For purely arbitrary purposes, let’s say these guys should have been pros for at least five years and have at least three wins on golf’s major professional tours. What we wish to explore here is who among those players is the most likely to break through at Merion. And of course, as with any list, it will be in order of most likely to least likely.

1) Justin Rose

Is this a bit of a cop out? After all, he is the highest-ranked golfer in the world without a major, currently sitting at No. 5 in the Official World Golf Rankings. But I bet a lot of casual fans would not have guessed that. When golfers talk about the top pros without a major, the conversation tends to steer toward Luke Donald, Lee Westwood or Sergio Garcia. But there sits Justin Rose, currently No. 5 in the world at 32 years old. And you know what? He probably has a lot less scar tissue compared to the other guys mentioned.

Not being lumped into a group that includes Donald, Westwood and Garcia group should be liberating. Rose has managed to avoid being the title of “best player without a major” despite potentially being exactly that. He has racked up seven top-10s in majors without suffering heartbreak (two of those coming in 2012), and without suffering the stigma of “will he ever get back here?” He has won big tournaments among his nine major Tour wins, counting among them a WGC win and a FedEx Playoff win.

Rose is in his prime, long off the tee and hits a lot of greens, currently 19th and 11th in those stats respectively. He is simply a very good all-around player, a proven winner and playing pretty well. It would surprise no one if he won this year’s U.S. Open. He will probably even be on the short list of favorites, though if he doesn’t win, no one will crush him for it. It is good to be Justin Rose, and that’s why he tops this list.

2) Ian Poulter

So to answer your first question, no I haven’t been paid off by the English. I just can’t imagine Ian Poulter going his whole career without a major. Here’s the grittiest grinder on the PGA Tour, with six top-10s in majors, half of which came in 2012. As a shorter hitter, he won’t be troubled by the sub-7000 yard layout at Merion, and his reputation as one of the best clutch putters in the world should serve him well when the greens get crusty.

I thought Poulter might get his major back in 2008 at the British Open at Birkdale. He was playing among the worst conditions we’ve seen in recent memory, making a putt for par on No. 18 and fist pumping vigorously to let golf fans know how much it meant to him. I thought he had it, but Padraig Harrington hit some great shots down the stretch and such is life. But what I know is that Poulter will win a major one day. Maybe sooner rather than later. The majors, like the Ryder Cup, deserve the famous Poulter face.

3) Brandt Snedeker

Snedeker has been playing so well of late that he should be followed around by Will Ferrell dressed as Mugatu from “Zoolander,” and after every shot he hits he should say “Snedeker, so hot right now, Snedeker.”

But here is another guy who isn’t necessarily super long, but will be very well suited to take on Merion. After winning twice in 2012, and capping it off by joining the short list of people who have won the FedEx Cup $10 million prize, Sneds showed no signs of slowing down in 2013. Here are his first five tournaments of the season: 3rd, 23rd, 2nd, 2nd, 1st. And since then he’s racked up two more top-10s at the Master and Players Championship, not exactly silly season events.

He is eighth on Tour in driving accuracy (is that important at a U.S. Open? Hmmmm, yes). He’s also fifth in scoring average and first in birdies. He has done all this despite a nagging bone condition called “low bone turnover,” which was just recently diagnosed and caused him quite a bit of pain even during his extended streak of hot play. He certainly could have been put higher on this list, but sooner or later an Englishman has to win a major, right? Right?

4) Hunter Mahan

Hunter Mahan is owed one. I don’t care what anyone says. See back in 2009 I took off the Monday of the U.S. Open to watch David Duval and Phil Mickelson duel it out at Bethpage, as any true golf fan would. I mean, Duval and Mickelson, what more could you ask for? And before Lucas Glover, not quite into full beard mode yet, ruined golf for the entire year by winning the tournament and “aw shucks-ing” his way through several interview (note, I like Glover but c’mon man, it could’ve been Duval!) the tournament was almost stolen by another player: Hunter Mahan.

I believe it was No. 16 where Mahan sat in the middle of the fairway either tied for the lead or down one. And he struck an 8 iron from about 160 yards and hit it so pure it was basically a certain birdie and was about to put him in the driver’s seat of the U.S. Open at a beastly course. Only it hit the flagstick and ricocheted about 30 yards back off the green, and he made a bogey that pretty much derailed the round. It was a really bad break; if that had happened to Sergio Garcia, he would have spent his entire press conference challenging the golf gods to a fight.

Mahan has had an interesting career, four top-10s in majors and has often been considered one of the best young players around. However, he has also experienced the lows of famously chunking his chip shot while playing the anchor spot in the Ryder Cup. You have to consider that it speaks volumes he was put there in the first place though. He has five PGA wins, two of which are WGC events. He has always been a good driver of the ball and hits a lot of greens. And confidence? This guy is married to a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Hunter Mahan will win a major, I am sure of this.

5) Dustin Johnson

Well, sometimes winning a major requires a lot of trial and error. Dustin Johnson has mastered the error part. He burst onto the scene in 2007 with booming drives and the occasional hot streak on the greens. While never ranking near the top of the Tour in strokes gained putting and not being known as a particularly good iron player, Johnson has nevertheless ranked in the top 10 in birdie average in four of his seven years on Tour (including this year). This is a guy who just gets hot and is always dangerous when he does.

He also has a knack for closing out tournaments when in position — as long as they aren’t majors. He’s been on Tour since late 2007, so basically we’re talking five and a half years here and he is already at seven Tour wins. No one younger than him has more Tour wins, and no one other than Rory Mcilroy has currently gotten to five while still being in their 20s. Simply put, Dustin Johnson is on his way to a pretty good career.

So why do we discard him? Well, the optimist in me would say he’s shown he can play in majors by already having played in the final group three different times. But the pessimist would say that in each he’s made some peculiar decisions that have ruined his chances in them, including the two-shot penalty he incurred in 2010 at the PGA Championship for grounding his club in a bunker and the total meltdown he had on Sunday at the U.S. Open that year. My feeling on him is that this stuff rolls off him. He seems like a confident guy, and he’s already won in 2013. And if he needs any advice on how to win, he can just call his girlfriend’s father, Wayne Gretzky.

So there you have it, that’s my top five. Yes, I’m aware I didn’t include Matt Kuchar or Luke Donald or the perrenial list-topper Lee Westwood, obvious choices it would seem. And certainly their names will pop up on many lists like this one. But there’s a lot of good golfers out there these days, a lot of people who can win.

I guess that’s why winning majors is so hard. Adam Scott would know.