I hope I'm wrong about Kurt Busch.

On Wednesday afternoon NASCAR announced that the suspended racer had completed the requirements of his sanctioning body-designed reinstatement plan. This weekend at the Phoenix International Raceway, he will return from a dramatic Daytona 500 eve sidelining that ended up being three races. He will be on indefinite probation, but he will be racing, and not just for wins but also for a spot in the postseason Chase for the Sprint Cup, thanks to a waiver granted by NASCAR.

When that announcement hit my inbox, my immediate reaction was that lone sentence above: I hope I'm wrong about Kurt Busch.

I hope that this comeback, merely the latest in a list of returns from stock car racing exile, is different than all the others. I hope that it doesn't fall into the same pattern we've seen from Busch before, which would be an apology/statement, some immediate success on the track during a period of acting on his best behavior, until those good manners start to show cracks -- snarkiness on the radio with his team, testy exchanges with the media -- and he eventually falls into another emotional canyon. Or worse, another weird, embarrassing brush with the law.

Kurt Busch has another fresh start with NASCAR on the track. But a lot needs to go right for him to stay there. Jerry Markland/Getty Images

I hope that all the people who flooded my email account and Twitter timeline after last week's "Busch should stay suspended" column are right. I hope that, as they said to me (albeit garnished with curse words), he has merely been misunderstood, made an example of unfairly in an age of testiness when it comes to domestic violence and thusly should have had his suspension cut short and been granted the Chase waiver. I hope that, as they say, the march of time and truth will show us that the accusations of abuse -- allegations that were solid enough to elicit an order from a family court but not criminal charges from a district attorney's office -- were overblown.

I hope that this is merely the middle chapter of what is ultimately the Kurt Busch story. That from here he will be a reinvented man and reinvigorated racer, inspired by his time on the sidelines to return to the form that made him a Cup champion nearly a decade and a half ago.

I hope that he has finally found true love with his new girlfriend and that what they have together will be so true and so enduring that his connection with Patricia Driscoll, aka the "trained assassin," will eventually become nothing more than an object in the rearview mirror of a happy home life.

I hope that the garage community outside of his own Stewart-Haas Racing team receives Kurt Busch with open arms this weekend, eager to let the motorsports martyr know that he has their support. Perhaps, as some readers have suggested, they'll even thank him for giving them hope that NASCAR won't ever "overreact" again, as so many fans claimed the sanctioning body did.

I hope that the NASCAR-approved health care expert who ultimately "recommended his immediate return" was spot-on in his or her evaluation. Just as I hope that whomever Busch meets with in compliance with the wishes of the Delaware family court will determine that he has found a balance in the areas of -- and these are the commissioner's words -- "mental health problems related to anger control and impulse control."

I sincerely hope that all of the above happens. The reality is that, in order for this just-ended suspension to have worked and for NASCAR to prove that it was justified in rolling the dice on Busch one more time, it needs to happen. All of it. He was told as much by the sanctioning body's brass when they met with him this week to discuss his reinstatement.

But the other reality of Wednesday's reinstatement is that Kurt Busch has stood at this crossroads before and he has failed there before, spectacularly so. Until he proves that he can do otherwise, there's no reason for us to believe that he has the ability to pull this off.

I hope I'm wrong about Kurt Busch. But I'm hoping against hope.