Carefully now … but it could be that this past weekend we saw Freddy Adu’s breakout game.

It’s been more than a year in the making, and while the waiting period may not quite have reached the point where Adu was turning into “A-who?”, doubts about the boy’s ability were inevitably being heard. So maybe Adu’s goal and two assists in D.C. United’s 3-1 win over Columbus on Saturday mark the emergence of the real Freddy.

The blaze of feverish publicity that surrounded the 14-year-old’s debut last season was always, in Cole Porter’s words, too hot not to cool down. And it was deliberately cooled by Peter Nowak, D.C. United’s coach, who used Adu sparingly – at times, it seemed, almost grudgingly. Nowak’s caution was probably wise: The risk of seeing Adu crushed by failure was too great.

Adu started only 14 of the team’s 30 games, recording a modest five goals and three assists. D.C. United won the championship, but Adu’s role was marginal. His 15 forgettable minutes of playing time in the final typified his low-key season.

When the 2005 season started last month, Adu was hunched in his familiar position on the bench. The implacable Nowak played him for only 16 minutes in D.C. United’s first game against Chivas USA and for only 28 minutes the following week against Chicago.

Adu started the next game in Columbus and probably wished he hadn’t, as he got enmeshed in a poor team performance and a 1-0 loss. So it was back to the bench for Freddy in the next game against New England, though an injury to Alecko Eskandarian brought Adu onto the field for the second half and saw him notch his first point of 2005 with an assist on a Santino Quaranta goal.

With Eskandarian still out for the next game in Kansas City, Adu looked certain to start. He didn’t, and after warming up for some 20 minutes, it was a non-smiling, manifestly frustrated Freddy who entered the game in the 77th minute. Thirteen minutes later, Adu got off a strong left-footed shot on goal that was immediately blocked; the rebound fell to his weaker right foot, and Adu, trying to shift the ball to his left, went down under pressure. All he got was a yellow-card caution for diving.

Then, in what was almost the last play of this dreary 0-0 tie, Adu seemed to say, “The hell with all this caution stuff, I need to be me,” and took off on a surging 35-yard dribble right down the middle of the field. He was muscled off the ball by a crowd of Kansas City defenders, but the speed, the ball control, the determination and, the power of the run were impressive and exhilarating.

This was Adu imposing himself, Adu unafraid of opponents, and unafraid to be selfish. This was a slight 15-year-old suddenly looking like a physical match for the older players all around him. It is no easy thing for a youngster to take command like that, to suddenly ignore all those sensible adult admonitions and cautions about not trying to do it all by himself. But the moment for action had arrived and Adu instinctively responded.

Would Nowak respond? Apparently not.

“We need to be patient,” a wary Nowak told the Washington Post three days later. “He’s doing better, but defensively and the whole package that we want to create with him, it’s not there.”

The return of Eskandarian for the following game with Columbus seemed to forecast more bench time for Adu. But Nowak dropped his caution: Not only did he start Adu, he al lowed him a more central midfield role.

Two minutes in, Adu roamed over to the left and lofted a cross into the Columbus penalty area – your everyday, standard cross that was easily cleared. Two minutes later, we saw the new, confident Adu. Again he was out on the left, but this time he shunned the easy cross. Adu took on his defender, dribbled past him, closed in on goal and then pushed a perfect ground ball across the face of the goal that Jaime Moreno slammed into the net.

Four minutes later, it got better. Now Adu received the ball in midfield, and immediately delivered a superb through ball. Perfectly placed and perfectly paced, the pass took two Columbus defenders out of the game and rolled invitingly to the feet of Ben Olsen, speeding down the right wing. Olsen’s cross was headed in by Joshua Gros.

After only eight minutes, D.C. was leading 2-0 and Adu had played a major role in both goals. At last his precocious skills – so energetically hyped but so rarely seen last year – were in full flow.

Late in the game, Adu scored his first goal of the season, dribbling into the Columbus penalty area, stumbling but staying on his feet, and coolly rapping a strong shot past goalkeeper Jon Busch. It was a selfish goal, if you like, a goal-scorer’s leave-it-to-me sort of goal, but that’s exactly the commanding style that Adu will need to become a great player.

This was not a misguidedly aggressive player, trying to impress by sheer physical energy. Such an approach would never work for Adu, whose skills – his personal, unique skills, the ones that make him Freddy Adu – live in a different realm. Subtlety is the key for Adu, soccer subtlety: the feints and trickery of defender-baffling ball control, plus the intangibles of vision, creativity, and timing.

These are often fragile properties, and Nowak has been correct to treat them delicately. The coach knows that Adu now looks confident and assertive (a rather different thing from aggressive). Now is the time to loosen the reins, to fret less about the “whole package” and the defensive duties, and let Adu shed the coaching cliches, and speak for himself on the field.

But – poor Nowak! – it won’t be that simple. Adu has blossomed at an awkward moment. The immediate beneficiary of his new form is likely to be Sigi Schmid, coach of the U.S. under-20 team. Schmid will soon be taking Adu to FIFA’s youth World Cup, played throughout June in the Netherlands. Now it is Nowak who has to suffer the frustration. For Adu, the chance of glory on the international stage beckons.