BOSTON – The end came at last in the late morning of a Friday in Lebanon, Ohio, Michelle Wie finally remembering that she was 15 years old, her game finally betraying her, and so a Brigham Young University junior named Clay Ogden finally closed her out of the U.S. Amateur Public Links quarterfinals.

Ogden never let Wie get close enough to him, and so he never let the dreamers get close enough to him, either. He won five early holes and was never threatened, and as a result, somewhere in Augusta, Ga., a stubborn old man named Hootie Johnson was able to breathe a sigh of relief. His august greens had been spared a distaff invader for another year.

Johnson had his own reasons for wanting Wie to get stopped somewhere short of winning that championship, which, since 1989, has sent its winner on to the following April’s Masters. Much as he has said for the record that he would welcome any woman to play his club as long as she properly qualified for the Masters, it was understood that Johnson – along with almost everyone else – believed there was as much a chance of that happening as Tiger Woods ordering up White Castle hamburgers for next year’s Champions Dinner.

Only, Wie came a lot closer than he – or anyone else – could have imagined. And so it turned out that Hootie wasn’t the only one who was privately wringing his hands at the prospect of a precocious 15-year-old female crashing the field at Augusta next year.

For some, the adjective “female” wasn’t the troubling part of the equation.

It was the “15-year-old” modifier that was most troublesome.

Many of these were the same folks who cheered when NBA Commissioner David Stern was able to push through his pet project, instituting an age requirement in the latest labor deal with his players that will preclude high school seniors from taking part in NBA drafts for now and for the foreseeable future.

Wie, of course, differs from most of the affected basketball players because she comes from a comfortable, two-parent background, because she doesn’t need the national forum on which she’s strode the past few months and, most notably, because for all the wonders she’s performed on golf courses this summer, from the LPGA Championship to the women’s U.S. Open, from the John Deere Classic to the Public Links tournament, has come as an amateur. She hasn’t made a dime off this adventurous summer.

And still, her presence makes people uncomfortable, in the same way the presence of child stars in all walks of celebrity has made people uncomfortable for years, whether you were talking about Danny Bonaduce or Adam Rich, any of the Bradys, any member of the cast of “Diff’rent Strokes,” or any cast member from “Stand by Me,” whether you’re talking about Britney or Lindsay or Lizzie McGuire. Child stars have become one of America’s great and most reliable punch lines, mostly because they deliver so regularly.

What’s the rush, they want to know? It’s the same questions for Michelle Wie that basketball stars for a generation have heard. Only instead of wondering aloud why the ballplayers don’t go to college for a year or two to enjoy themselves, hang on to the last vestiges of childhood, people want to know why Wie doesn’t just enjoy herself this summer, hang out by the beach (she is from Hawaii, after all) and act the part of a boy-crazed 15-year-old.

In some ways, the reasoning against such reasonable requests is similar. If you read Ian O’Connor’s fine book, “The Jump,” in which he chronicled the senior year of Sebastian Telfair at Lincoln High School, you will be confronted on every page by a very simple question: If Telfair was going to spend the 2004-05 season playing basketball every day anyway – and let’s not kid ourselves, college players play every bit as often as their professional counterparts – why shouldn’t he get paid for it?

Similarly, those who question the motivations of Wie or her handlers (also known as her parents) fail to take into account that if Wie weren’t spending the summer playing golf in the company of grown-ups, honing her game in front of all those television cameras, she would still be living a life considered quite unorthodox by most other 15-year-olds. There would be no beach. There would be no afternoons at the mall, no nights at the movies, no lounging around the living room day after day after blissful summer day. No, as a top-ranked junior player, Wie would be playing golf almost every day, playing junior events, spending the summer on the junior circuit.

The attention would be less, but not the grind. And if you’re going to grind anyway, why not do it at the highest level? Why not try to make history? By every indication, Wie’s parents are well-intentioned folks. She is not being exploited. She is not on the fast track to be a golfing Dana Plato.

Let her play. Let her go for it. And let us enjoy it.

(Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is WriteBackVac@aol.com. His Yankees-Red Sox book, “Emperors and Idiots,” is available in bookstores everywhere).

VAC’SWHACKS

Such is the story of a Mets fan in the summer of 2005: Mike Piazza reaches back to 1999 and smokes a three-run home run to beat the Braves, and it doesn’t seem like anything could possibly overshadow that. And then Curt Schilling puts one on a tee for Alex Rodriguez about a half-hour later, and …

Who’s had more farewell tours, the Rolling Stones or Jack Nicklaus?

If real unions were run as well as the NHL Players Association, there would still be sweatshops on every block and the minimum wage would be a buck and a half an hour.

If Pat Riley really does swoop down from the tower and stab Stan Van Gundy in the back, Isiah ought to be ready with a bag full of money to ease Stan’s pain.