All of what he achieves appears so utterly effortless that were you to arrive from Sri Lanka tomorrow and go to a Pittsburgh Penguins game, you would have no idea which is the one out there who is the pre-eminent hockey player in all the world. Instead, your sight would surely be drawn elsewhere–oh, probably first to the team’s other superb player, the dashing Czech, Jaromir Jagr, with his shirt out and his long hair flowing from behind his helmet, Custer on the ice. Lemieux, though, merely sweeps–flows–diagonally across the rink, so naturally, flawlessly controlling the puck, then dropping it off so that it seems he must have idly lost it … until it slips, mystically, upon the meat of a teammate’s stick.

It was all so neat, the game, the skill, the luck, the body. When someone asked him once what it was he had to do to stay in shape, guilelessly Lemieux answered: ““A month before the season I stop putting ketchup on my french fries.''

And then came the back surgery.

And after that came the cancer.

There is nothing so unnatural as a natural athlete brought down by natural causes. Whereas we do accept that, vocationally, pitchers will tear rotator cuffs and quarterbacks will fracture ankles, the idea that anyone so physically blessed as Mario Leemieux might be at mortal risk no less than the rest of us defies our sense of order–and our ideal of beauty and achievement, too, I suspect.

To appreciate what Lemieux has accomplished reasonably demands retelling. As the Penguins begin another NHL season this Friday, on what is his 31st birthday, Lemieux has not only returned from his cancer, his Hodgkin’s disease–from a whole year off, enduring radiation and the attendant fatigue, as well as the awful, recurring back pain–but returned to become again the league’s leading scorer and Most Valuable Player of 1995-96.

There have been so many comebacks in sports recently–and sports positively adores comebacks, too. Redemption is next only to victory. Somehow, though, the extraordinary physical recovery of Lemieux has passed with far less notice than, say, the hoopla accorded Michael Jordan and Mike Tyson in their return from sojourns in other venues, or the credit given to Monica Seles and, most recently, to David Cone, in their brave rehabilitations.

There are a number of reasons for this, starting with the fact that ice hockey itself is not quite a full athletic partner in the national consciousness (or in prime time); if baseball, basketball and football are the Marx brothers, hockey is Zeppo. Then, too, Pittsburgh itself is lacking municipal celebrity, dismissively labeled now in sport as ““a small market.’’ Although the Penguins made the semifinals of the Stanley Cup last year, and can bank on the spectacular Lemieux and Jagr, they still lost money. Much of America doesn’t yet even know how to pronounce the world’s greatest hockey player’s name (it is more of a cat’s mew than a cow’s moo).

Moreover, Lemieux himself is, simply, the strong, silent type. Driving home after doctors found the cancerous lump in his neck in 1993, he cried, for himself and for trying to figure how he could tell his wife that, of all the people in the world, Mario Lemieux had cancer. Never since then, though, has there been a tear; neither has he ever milked his misfortune. But that is of a piece. When drafted out of French Canada, he was terrified to come to alien Pittsburgh, and even now he hides far out of town, living in a huge old turn-of-the-century mansion with his wife and three young children. Of course, given his noble fight against his Hodgkin’s, it is difficult for anyone to criticize the man, but even taking that into account, about the grandest controversy that has ever soiled him is that he plays too much golf. Heavens!

As a consequence of all this, Lemieux, No. 66, has never attained the sort of crossover fame that has come to old 99, Wayne Gretzky, The Great One: he who is married to a movie actress, he who keeps moving across the NHL landscape, from Edmonton to L.A. to St. Louis and now to New York, sprinkling stardust upon his sport wherever he alights. Gretzky is not the fabulous legend he once was–his transfer to the Rangers is reminiscent of the fading Hollywood star taking a lead in a CBS sitcom–but apart from dyed-in-the-wool hockey aficionados, Gretzky’s name recognition still far exceeds Lemieux’s.

Notwithstanding Gretzky’s abiding majesty, posterity will never forget that no athlete–not even the sainted Lou Gehrig–has ever before Lemieux been struck down by a dead- ly disease at the very moment when he was the best of his sport at the best he ever would be. And since: Lemieux has achieved miraculously in remission, struggling, on the side, with a back injury so grievous that it has benched him after he merely laced up a skate. That is the stuff that answers people these days when they wonder where all our sports heroes have gone. Isn’t it?

So, as another season starts, may we pause just to say: Happy birthday, Mario Lemieux. Godspeed.