Now that she's been seized and searched, pronged and pinched, and found flesh and blood; now that she's finally lost a few tennis matches, it's fairly obvious that one of the more astounding elements of Jennifer Capriati's comeback has turned out to be just how un-astounding it really is.

At least to those aficionados who recollect Jennifer in swaddling clothes, Jennifer blistering the very fuzz off every ball, Jennifer smiling and giggling and blurting out another fabulous loopy teenage Val-girl description for the ages (for instance, calling the legendary Martina Navratilova "The Ledge"), Jennifer in ascendance, Jennifer as absolute Girl, Un-Interrupted.

For the fact is, nearly everybody in the sport not only saw this coming -- if Capriati ever set her mind and especially her body to the task -- but also they welcomed it. That's not merely because of her exquisite talent but also because of the kind of person she has always been, even in the lean (or, rather, the rebel substances-induced puffy) years.

In a sport infamous on the distaff side for its hissing, hair-pulling rivalries -- surely Martina and Lindsay and Anna and Mary and Arantxa and The Predator Sisters and all the rest would prefer to shed their latent verbal hostility and just get it on -- has anybody ever heard anybody else say anything remotely nasty about Jennifer Capriati?

The Capster is sweet, kind, thoughtful, unpretentious, unselfish, caring and sharing. Even Hingis, the Crown Princess of Dis who has unleashed her sardonic smack on just about every Jane and Jill who has crossed the white lines, cannot help but like her. After Hingis moved to Florida, she even helped Capriati in her comeback -- manifesting her own work ethic as a model, engaging in serious competitive hits, the result of which being that Jennifer realized if she could actually mash Marty on occasion (which she could and did), she could whip the rest of the world, as well.

As for Capriati's own game, again it should not be particularly stunning that after she got clean and mean and restored her confidence, Jennifer began right away beating the best. She always possessed as much power as anybody (The Sisters Will and Davenport), not to mention the versatility (Hingis) and competitiveness (Monica Seles) to match any of her older or younger peers. Many Jennologists still believe that if the 15-year-old Capriati had won rather than lost her epic battle with the 17-year-old Seles in the 1991 U.S. Open semifinals, her life's path would have been drastically altered.

Finally back on the yellow brick path, as the Capriati Revival Tour Over Tennis moves onto the hot asphalt of New York, a single negative note remains: what Jennifer, and her sport itself, missed because she squandered those prime years. At base, in fact, she is a sad echo of other Athletes Interrupted -- Ted Williams gone to war, Ben Hogan crushed in a car -- and in another sense, of youth wasted on the young: James Dean and Buddy Holly and Janis Joplin and all the other star-crossed celebrity children struck down before their true genius could blossom.

Thank goodness Jennifer survived her own crash. Now
-- to borrow from the lyrics of Virginia's visionary troubadour, Bruce Hornsby -- "Oh my my, when she walks on by, it's hard not to get lost in the view."

Moreover, thank goodness for time. For healing. For a strong, supportive family.

And welcome back, Jen. We missed you.

Curry Kirkpatrick is covering the U.S. Open for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail curry.kirkpatrick@espnmag.com.