Truth be told, Michelle Wie confesses, "I've been looking forward to 2007 for four years, actually."

The reason: "...because (this) is the year I'm going to graduate. So, it is going to be an awesome year and I'm really looking forward to it."

Presumably, the 17-year-old Wie was talking about her high school graduation, June 2, from Punahou School.

But this being the week of the Sony Open in Hawai'i, where she also tees off tomorrow for a fourth year, there are hopes and, indeed, expectations of a graduation of a whole other sort.

Such as, will this be the year she steps from promising to productive? The year in which she becomes the first female since since Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias in 1945 to make the cut in a PGA Tour event? Will it mark the arrival of the long-anticipated first win on the LPGA Tour?

One — or more — of these breakthroughs before she matriculates to Stanford University in the fall would be in keeping with what we've all come to expect from golf's most watched and marketed prodigy.

It would be what we thought we were on the verge of seeing in 2004 when, as a 14-year-old freshman, Wie was one stroke away from history and making the 36-hole cut in a field with 143 men.

But sport, this one especially, has a way of confounding timelines and disrupting the best-laid plans of even the remarkably talented and widely famous as the last two Sony Opens have underlined. Sometimes in tear-soaked frustration.

So, here she is back at Waialae Country Club, a place made more familiar by her status as its youngest member, albeit, an honorary one. Back, more confident, more challenge-tested, looking to take an anticipated but so-far elusive step in front of family and a few thousand of her closest friends and followers.

In an attempt to make the leap after a disappointing finish to her first year as a pro, Wie went back to school over break time. Well, swing guru David Leadbetter's Golf Academy in Orlando, Fla., anyway, for a two-week refresher course that, to hear her tell it, sounded a lot more like a 10,000-mile overhaul at the auto dealer. But a needed one nonetheless.

"It was time for that oil change, that swing change, that tire change," Wie said. "I had a flat tire on my swing. It was my swing. Going down there for two weeks, working out with my trainer in the morning and seeing my (performance) psychologist, not thinking about anything else, not thinking about school, about college anymore, just working on my swing. It made me a lot more grounded and confident afterward."

Time will tell.

After all, she's been on one graduation countdown or another for a while now.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.