You probably won't know just now. You probably won't know for a while whether the step Andy Roddick appeared to take Wednesday on a tennis court in Melbourne, Australia, was the giant one or simply another one. They almost never paint breakthroughs in neon.

	Will Andy Roddick be frustrated or thrive under the pressure of being America's hope?

But what is beyond dispute, as of this minute, is that America has located its hope for the future of men's tennis in a 20-year-old with a blazing serve. To which the only reasonable response is this:

Heaven help Andy Roddick.

It won't get easier for Roddick, and that is both the good news and the bad. Roddick's classic five-set victory over Morocco's Younes El Aynaoui, a nearly five-hour marathon that went to a staggering 21-19 finish in the final set, not only gave the American his farthest advance in a Grand Slam tournament (the semifinals of the Aussie Open) but also officially introduced him to the United States as a respectable heir to the likes of Sampras and Agassi.

Now, two things about that: (1) Andre Agassi ain't dead yet; and (2) The one thing Americans do at a rate that exceeds the rest of the sporting world is build up idols precisely in order to tear them down.

That's the part about the bad news, and the great fascination now is in seeing how Roddick will deal with it. The thing about the star-making machinery is this: The malfunction rate is incredible.

Roddick is indeed a fair heir. He is in possession of a game formidable enough to have rocketed him into four finals on the ATP tour last season. He won his first five titles on the tour faster than either Agassi or Sampras did at the outset of their Hall of Fame careers.

But we keep score in big numbers on this playground. We keep score using the Grand Slam schedule as our chalkboard and, occasionally, the Davis Cup as our eraser. And despite the gradual annexation of the sports world by People magazine and Rolling Stone, the scoreboard remains the harsh delineation between the mere wizard and the true star.

In some of the obvious ways, Roddick's is the classic story of a young man growing into his talent. Even at just 20, he sometimes appears light years removed from his breakout rookie season as an 18-year-old, when he was alternately sensational and simply sensationalistic. This is a player coming to grips with the level of his talent, not unlike the transformation Serena Williams has undergone over the past 12 months, and that is a process that can be daunting as all get out.

What do you do when the world wants you to be as good as the two finest Americans of the tennis generation immediately before yours? If you want the dream, what you do is go back to work.

The Roddick who pushed past El Aynaoui in that agonizing fifth set was the one who went to work. He was the one who pushed through his relatively disappointing sophomore season in 2002 and then threw himself into a serious training regimen. After Roddick pulled out the match, he noted that by late in the fifth set, "strategy was out the door ... it was just pure fighting," and the Roddick who prevailed was the fighter.

And it doesn't answer everything, of course. No one ever made his name on a single match, no matter how memorable; and there will be plenty of people lining up to take note of the fact that Roddick had El Aynaoui by 10 years when it came down to who could outlast whom.

Perfectly fine, all of it. In fact, let the line form here. It's part of the deal, after all, and the noise around Andy Roddick will get infinitely louder before it even comes close to dying down.

The Americans, that is, have found their next great hope in men's tennis. Roddick should love it, assuming he survives it.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com