David Mulder was taking a taxi home from Montreal General Hospital Monday night when the driver asked him, “Have you heard?” In this city, that can mean only one thing.

Saku Koivu is coming back from stomach cancer to rejoin his Habs tonight for what may be the most storied game in their storied 84-year history -- the one in which a no-name team that has been playing all season without its captain tries to clinch its first playoff berth in four years. Of course Mulder had heard. Earlier in the day, the Canadiens’ team doctor was the one who had cleared the green-eyed Finn to play.

Mulder was the one who broke the news to Saku in September, when Saku walked into his examining room thinking he had food poisoning, and walked out having learned he had a disease that killed half the people who contracted it within five years. Over the next six months, Mulder also watched Saku fill his body with poisonous chemotherapy drugs in a longshot bid to kill the hungry cells that were killing him. Mulder rejoiced along with Saku and his family in February when they learned that the chemo worked, that the cancer was in remission. And Mulder, the scientist, was the one who warned Saku that he shouldn’t expect to return to the ice until the fall.

Others echoed the warning. Chris Carmichael, who was hired by the Habs to supervise Saku’s recovery based on the work he's done with Lance Armstrong, warned about getting too caught up in deadlines. When I called Carmichael last night in Brussels, where he is helping Armstrong prepare for the World Cup, he expressed amazement, calling Saku’s progress “the second miracle I’ve seen happen in front of me.” At some point today, he will hand a phone to Armstrong, and Armstrong will wish his fellow cancer survivor good luck.

But this isn’t about miracles. Nor is it simply about a 27-year-old all-star electrifying a city. It’s about Saku Koivu redefining the art of the possible.

When Saku learned his cancer was in remission and started his road back, Mulder searched for literature that might shed light on the only question that matters: Whether a high-impact rehabilitation schedule could put Saku in peril of having his cancer return. “As a scientist, you try to look to the experiences of others,” he says. “But there just weren’t any other cases like this.”

The cancer that had festered inside was maddeningly abstract, a floating mass of cells that hid deep in his marrow. You can visualize a tumor. But not the Burkitt’s lymphoma that was a rolling, invisible killer. No matter how good Saku might have felt on a given day when he was still undergoing his chemo treatments, he couldn’t dismiss the notion that the cells were just regrouping for their next attack. It was maddening.

But as Mulder set a series of benchmarks for Saku to aim for, the center could focus on the tangible. Like restoring the protein in his muscle, which had been depleted by the chemo. Or getting his heart rate to bounce back after it got elevated by exercise. (Mulder wanted to see it drop 30 percent in 10 seconds.) Koivu stunned his trainers by breaking each boundary with alarming efficiency. “The guy is a preparation machine,” Mulder says.

The last boundary involved Saku’s red blood cell count. Red cells, which are made in the bone marrow, carry oxygen through the blood. So much of Koivu’s marrow was killed by the chemo that his count was at half its normal level. Bit by bit, Mulder set targets to build it back up. In early March, it had to be 114. Then 120. And then 130. The next and last level was 150. He reached it yesterday at 10 a.m. “Saku was smiling, and he told me that if we didn’t hit 150 then he was going into the weight room and we’d just do it again in the afternoon,” Mulder says.

When Carmichael was first hired to work with Saku, he warned that the Canadiens captain would feel different when he resumed playing. “What Saku has gone through is face his own mortality and look at it squarely,” he said. “There are a lot of survivorship issues. It doesn’t feel the same as before.”

Where Saku might have been cool and controlled before, Mulder sees him as being open and full of life now. After I wrote about him in The Magazine and on its web site, I was flooded with emails, many from cancer patients or their parents who talked about the value of hope. When you’re getting needles shoved into your spine and it’s in short supply, it’s impossible to understand what a gift that can be. Saku understands this now. This morning, he sent a stack of tickets to Mulder’s wing for the nursing staff.

Koivu’s family has flown in from Finland to be with him. His fiancée will be by his side too. Pity the Ottawa Senators for having to be the bad guys.

But tonight isn’t about the Canadiens beating them. It’s about Saku Koivu beating cancer, and giving us one of the rarest, most remarkable moments that the sports world is capable of producing.

Les Glorieux indeed.

Shaun Assael is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at shaun.assael@espnmag.com.