By Jerry Dowling

We still hope the day will arrive when we get it right with Junior Griffey, when he pushes the Reds to new glory through the enlargement of his own and brings a championship back to the riverfront while securing his high place in Reds history. But it's getting better all the time.

By the time Griffey took St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Matt Morris to the right field seats in St. Louis for his 500th career home run on June 20, it had been a week since Griffey went deep and two weeks since he hit No. 498. In the meantime, the Reds lost six consecutive games during which the pitchers walked an average of six hitters per game. Somehow, the home run chase was found in some corners to be a distraction that threw the club off its rocker.

Griffey and his father Ken Griffey Sr. also were carting family from Oakland to Cleveland to Philadelphia and St. Louis in pursuit of No. 500. This had to be turning expensive. In the end, though, the Griffey story always has been a Father's Day story, and one kind of figured it would happen on Father's Day.

The wait left plenty of time for the great game's scribes to turn over the meaning of Junior Griffey and remind us that this man is a truly great ball player, the injuries of the past three years making us much too aware that he's also just a guy. We remember also that the guy is only the third in baseball history to hit 40 or more home runs in seven consecutive seasons and that he was the youngest player to reach 350, 400 and 450 home runs.

The two-week wait for Griffey's 500th homer packed ball parks and stopped baseball fans in living rooms all over America whenever he stepped up for another crack. In light of the power surge leading to No. 498, the wait was distorted. After two weeks, even Reds broadcaster Chris Welsh said on the air that the media was blowing the home run chase out of proportion. Much frustration.

But the real irritation with the wait for Griffey's 500th homer wasn't the two weeks, but the two years. When Griffey hit his 400th career homer on April 10, 2000, during his earliest days with the Reds, we looked forward to No. 500 coming no later than the middle of 2002, followed by No. 600 about now, No. 700 sometime in 2006 and the blast that would break Henry Aaron's mark coming in 2007, before the expiration of Griffey's nine-year contract.

There's no point retelling the sad events that have ensued. Perhaps, though, we can recontextualize them and see the beauty in what Griffey and his career have come to mean.

The heart sags a little to think through the past three years of injuries and frustration, then note that the youngest man to hit 400 homers is only the sixth youngest man to hit 500. But it's all good.

The Griffey saga has made a happy turn this year, bringing back the splendid ball player, if not "The Kid" everyone remembers so fondly with the cap turned backwards and the smile all the way across his face. Griffey was once a kid, and a damn fine one in this game, racing to career milestones faster than any of the other greats.

But he's not a kid anymore, and that's worth celebrating, too. In so many ways, the ball player who hit his 500th homer isn't the same one who hit his 100th or even his 400th. The man who hit his 500th is much more accomplished, even if slower to the milestone.

The Junior Griffey of 2000 was a wonder of nature, a beautiful athlete, an artist in this game, perhaps on a trajectory to be the greatest of all time. At age 30, having averaged 52 homers per year from 1996 to 1999, it seemed no career from past history would stand between Griffey and the highest seat in the pantheon.

But he also was a kid in many ways, even at age 30, like anyone else. And one bit we might have learned from Griffey and his travails in the past three years is that baseball isn't really or entirely a game for kids. It's a job for adults to persevere through the hard times Griffey had never known, the blown knees and hamstrings that have characterized the past three seasons and stolen his pace with greatness.

Even before the injuries, we began noting chinks in his armor, tendencies to perceive unreal slights and over-react to small offenses. And Griffey's return in 2000 ended in the shadow of a white flag as Reds waved off a possible playoff run in favor of their ill-fated rebuilding for 2003. So the air around the ball club was thick and the homecoming wasn't all yellow ribbons tied around old oak trees.

Indeed, the homecoming evidently offered a new challenge for the returning superstar. The hometown is tough on its athletes. The niggling and naggling, the constant attention paid to top players, the responsibilities with which fans entrust them -- it's all quite a heavy load. To survive the crucible, Griffey would have to become more than he was or he'd drive himself to distraction.

One top Reds executive, since departed, scoffed some years ago at the notion Griffey would have to grow up. He didn't dispute that Griffey hadn't grown up; only that he would ever need to. Griffey had the whole thing beat, the exec said. Griffey had all the baseball talent in the world, all the money he'd need, trustworthy people taking care of his business, a family he loves. He'd never need to grow up.

But everyone needs to mature, and Griffey's career would have been stopped in its tracks the past three years if he hadn't. One can only imagine the enormous frustration of the past three seasons for him, always rehabbing from injury, losing his chance to compete, then being trashed by the fans because he couldn't be the centerpiece of a contender.

Only today do we look at Griffey thinking his best days might still be in the future. He's healthy and in good shape, he's got to be mentally tougher and he still can swing the bat. He's a story of a man fighting with his fate and taking the upper hand. He's a heroic story, in more ways than one.

Only 20 players in the game's history have hit 500 home runs. It's worth remembering in light of all the home run moments of recent years, when we've seen so many standards fall without it ever being far from mind that steroids or human growth hormones were involved. It's made these home run chases into snares of marketing and athletic cynicism. Griffey's chase might have taken a while, but its ending does honor to a man who came by it honestly.

It was all about hope when Griffey came to the Reds in 2000. It can be about hope again. The Griffey of 500 homers might have given us a moral for which we wouldn't have wished, but he can give up hope we would never have seen in the Griffey of 400 homers.

Here's to growing and hoping, being true to ourselves, learning to withstand misfortune graciously, weathering the storms and guiding ourselves to paradise. And always, by heaven, to good health.

We loved the kid, but we shouldn't snarl because the kid has gone away. He's been replaced by a man's work of 500 homers -- the first 400 in the bosom of a child's game, the next 100 against the hard knocks of man's trial.

They took four years. Perhaps the next 100 won't.