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The race, the nil-guard, and the redundant struct maps are all addressed, thanks. A few items are still open in the reworked gatherURL:

1. Six early-return error paths (L478-529: http.NewRequest, BearerToken file read, BearerTokenString.Get, Username.Get, Password.Get) skip the stat updates entirely, so gathers_total{status="failure"} undercounts those failures.

2. connection_status is inconsistent across "connected but no metrics" outcomes:

   • content-length-exceeded (L585-590) sets it to 0
   • parse error (L624-628) leaves it at 1

3. The new stats have no test coverage. The test diff only wires up Statistics: selfstat.NewCollector(nil) to keep existing tests compiling; nothing asserts connectStat / successStat / failureStat values.

Both 1 and 2 fall out naturally if you account gathers_total once in the Gather goroutine from the err returned by gatherURL (and handle the content-length skip explicitly), which also drops the three stat params from gatherURL’s signature.