SharePoint Online Communication Sites Hero Web Part

All,

I am looking to modify the link property for the Hero Web Part so I can open a dialog box or even a new window.  

My initial thoughts were to override the click event of the image div, or replace the href property through jquery.   Looking through the page source, I found a OOTB global script that contains an object called spClientSidePageContext that contains the links.   I thought this might be promising to change the property value here, however it appears I cannot access this object.

Let me know your thoughts.