WASHINGTON — Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The economy added around 200,000 jobs, wages grew a little more than 2 percent, and unemployment slowly receded.

That’s been the story of the economy for the past five years, and it was the story last month, too. Specifically, the economy added 215,000 jobs, wages rose 2.3 percent from a year ago, and the only wrinkle was that the unemployment rate actually increased ever-so-slightly from 4.9 percent to 5 percent instead of staying flat. Although at this point it feels like I don’t even need to tell you all this. You can almost fill in the blanks yourself.

But that doesn’t mean that the details never change. They do. Sometimes the economy only adds 150,000 jobs, and other times it adds 250,000. Sometimes it doesn’t look like wages are growing at all, and other times it looks like they’re growing much more robustly. And sometimes the unemployment rate ticks up for the good reason that more people are looking for work, and other times it ticks down for the even better reason that so many people are finding it. If you take a longer view, though, all these bumps and blips fade away, and you’re left with a familiar story: the little recovery that could. It’s been slow, it’s been steady, and it’s been saying I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can for a long time now.

The only thing that has changed is that it finally might be starting to get close to where it’s going.

But only starting to. Why is that? Well, even though the unemployment rate has returned to normal, wages have not. Think about it like this: in a healthy economy, companies would have to fight over workers by offering raises of 3.5 to 4 percent a year. So the fact that those are only 2.3 percent today tells us that something still isn’t right. That there must be a decent number of “shadow unemployed” left, who either can’t find the full-time jobs they want or have given up looking altogether, giving companies the leverage they need to keep wages down.

And now they’re coming back – although that might not be the best way to put it. As FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman points out, the people entering the workforce right now aren’t necessarily re-entering it. A lot of them are recent grads or stay-at-home parents who might have thought things didn’t look good before but do now. In any case, though, the labor force has grown more in the last six months than it has at any other time in the last 25 years except for early 2000 – and that’s even in percent terms.

This is the boom we’ve been looking for. It’s bringing unemployment down, it’s bringing workers off the sidelines, and it’s not bringing inflation. That last part is the silver lining to the dark cloud of stagnant pay. It means that the Federal Reserve can let this continue without having to worry about prices rising far above its 2 percent target. That, in turn, might mean millions of more jobs, and, if the recovery keeps chugging along, millions of more raises down the line.

In other words, everything that made us hate the recovery before is a reason to love it today. Yes, it’s gone too slow for a lot of people, but it’s not going too fast for the 10 people who matter most – the Fed’s voting members. Give the recovery enough time, like we have, and it will start to reach the people who need it most.

I think it can. I think it can.