They gathered privately behind the checkered curtains and around the tropical-patterned booths of Murphy's Bar and Grill in Honolulu about a month ago, and one by one they stood to tell their stories. There was the emergency room receiving doctor, who was there as the ambulance arrived with the bloodied body. There was the trauma center surgeon, who found himself staring at a man who ought to be dead. There was the thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon, who knew that even if he repaired that torn aorta in time, there was the likelihood that June Jones would leave the operating room a paraplegic.

And then there was the ambulance paramedic intern, who stood in that bar with the other 60 or so people connected with this miracle and said what they all must have thought when Hawaii's football coach was first wheeled into Queen's Medical Center the morning of Feb. 22: No way would Jones see the morning of Feb. 23.

"I'm sorry, Coach Jones," said an emotional John Kanaulu, turning to face the man whose life he had helped save. "But I really thought you weren't going to make it. I thought we were going to bring you in and you were going to die ... and there was nothing we could do about it."

Jones bowed his head and tried to fight back the tears. It was the first time he had heard what really happened after he nodded off behind the wheel of his 1999 black Lincoln Town Car, the first time he had met many of the medical and support personnel. He doesn't remember the 10:30 a.m. collision, or how the car traveled nearly 80 feet unpiloted before going airborne and slamming front-first into a concrete freeway pillar at 55 mph. But Jones will never forget that day at Murphy's, when he happily picked up the tab for the invitation-only mahalo (thank you) party, signed autographs, posed for photos and hugged anything that moved.

"Is there anything you want?" said Jones, as he embraced Kanaulu.

"The only thing I would ask for is what you already gave me: thanking me and my partners," Kanaulu said.

Jones is a human thank-you note these days. He owes everything to these people, to his mind- boggling luck, to forces he says he can't begin to understand. "Listening to them, I was convinced more than ever that I really was supposed to be dead," he says. "It just wasn't my time, that's all. I've thought and thought about it, and I know I'm only here because of divine intervention."

Had Jones not ruined a perfectly good fatal car crash by surviving, some boogie boarder off Makapu'u Beach Park would have paddled through his ashes by now. That's where he always said he wanted his cremated remains to be sprinkled, across the same waves and sand where he loved to body surf. And had he not somehow beaten the medical odds ("The doctors told me one in 10 million," he says), Jones would have never been at War Memorial Stadium on the island of Maui on Sept.8, nervously pacing his team's makeshift locker room as the Warriors counted the minutes until their season opener against Montana.

None of the players said a peep about his return. They didn't have to. They knew that underneath the three good-luck leis draped across Jones' buttoned-up short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt was a surgical scar that snaked from their coach's chest to his abdomen. The plastic surgeon had managed to hide the evidence of the nearly 150 stitches that closed the cuts to Jones' head, but there wasn't much that could be done about the chest incision. During the Warriors' two-a-day practices, Jones would peel off his signature black sweatshirt and try to tan away the scar in the morning Honolulu sun. His players tried not to stare, but how can you ignore someone touched by an angel?

"Usually, if you tear your aorta, you die in like, 30 seconds," says Kanaulu, now a certified paramedic. "That's the miracle part of it. Before we got him out of the car, he should have been dead. Everything we saw defied all logic, defied our understanding of how people die."

Or how they live. A three-inch piece of Dacron tubing holds Jones' aorta together. A six-inch screw keeps his left elbow in place. There are suture marks where part of his tongue was reattached. His lacerated liver was sewn back into one piece. His broken ribs have healed. He somehow avoided being paralyzed.

His players have seen him return from 5:30 a.m. workouts that begin in the solitude of the UH weightroom and end on the track just below the window of his office. Jones can walk, but his legs can't quite remember how to run just yet. So he grimaces and grinds his way around that track, his feet scraping the ground as if he were wearing chain-gang shackles. Two months ago, he could barely shuffle forward for 40 yards. Now he can semijog eight sets of 100 yards. No wonder nobody who knows Jones has the nerve to tell him he won't be able to run in next year's Honolulu Marathon. This is how Jones keeps winning Hawaii's heart, as a living legend, not a dead one.

He already was beloved throughout the Islands for what he did two years ago. Jones, the former coach of the Atlanta Falcons, turned down a multimillion-dollar offer from the San Diego Chargers and instead accepted a $320,000-per-year package from Hawaii, a pitiful program up to its lei in red ink and apathy. Jones led the Warriors to the greatest one-season turnaround in Division 1-A history-from 0-12 to 9-4, a bowl victory and more school passing records than you can shake a first-down marker at. Attendance spiked, black ink flowed, national recruits like quarterback Timmy Chang of Honolulu's famed St. Louis High decided to stay home. For the first time in years, Hawaii didn't have an inferiority complex.

"Most times people use Hawaii as a stepping stone to someplace else," says Artie Wilson, a former UH hoops star who is president of the school's Letterwinners Club, and who grew up with Jones in Portland, Ore. "He chose to come to Hawaii. June could probably run for public office and win right now -- mayor, governor ... anything."

Jones would be happy with a full run around the UH track, to say nothing of a run at the WAC championship and another bowl appearance. That's one of the reasons he ignored his doctors' pleas to go easy on the rehab. Somehow Jones' DNA has him wired to prove everybody wrong. "I'm gonna get it done," he says. "In my whole life, things haven't come easy for me."

Jones is always going against the grain. He stiffed the pros to become Joe College. He insisted on the run-and-shoot offense for the Falcons, even though members of his staff told him it would never work. He wouldn't wear a seat belt ... and lived to tell about it. "That's June," says Wilson. "You tell June to turn right, he's going left."

Two nights before the accident, an exhausted Jones dozed off on Wilson's couch at 8 p.m. after giving yet another speech that day. (Jones would address a barbershop quartet if he thought it would help the UH program.) "He had burned the candle at both ends," says Wilson. "He was constantly going, going, going."

"I don't ever get tired during the day, unless sometimes if I'm just sitting there by myself," Jones says. "I guess that's what happened ... I was in the car by myself, and I just faded away."

Alan Powers, Jeff Kurishima and Kanaulu were cleaning their ambulance from an earlier call when they were dispatched to the Pearl Harbor/Hickman AFB/Nimitz off-ramp on Route H-1. There had been a single-vehicle collision. The police on the scene said it was a possible DOA. By the time the ambulance arrived, bystanders had already peeked inside the wreckage. "It's June Jones!" they yelled. "It's Coach Jones!" Kanaulu looked at the car as he hurried with his drug bag to the passenger's side of the Lincoln. "It was a full-size car turned into a compact car," he says. Then he looked at the crumpled Jones. "I thought he was dead."

Kanaulu reached inside and touched Jones. Jones moaned and tried to sit up. With the help of Powers, Kanaulu squeezed inside the car's back door and placed a plastic collar around Jones' neck. There were Titleist golf clubs strewn about, including a 2-iron that had snapped during impact and flown through the air bag and into the steering wheel -- exactly where Jones likely would have been had he worn his seat belt.

Jones was placed on a flat board, secured and pulled out of the wreckage. His legs and right arm wouldn't move. He had lacerations on the right side of his face. The cuts were so deep that Powers told Kanaulu he thought he could see brain matter.

As Kurishima drove at 70 mph to Queen's, Jones' blood oxygen level began to drop. Jones would need to be intubated, a procedure in which the paramedics would place a metal blade in his mouth and then run a tube down his throat just past his vocal chords. To do this, a medication called succinylcholine would have to be administered. In essence, says Kanaulu, succinylcholine is used to paralyze the muscles in an injured person's body. This was no gimme. Under these circumstances the use of succinylcholine can cause death. "His heart could have stopped at that point," says Kanaulu.

Powers and Kanaulu decided to flip a coin to see who would have to administer the succinylcholine. Kanaulu pulled a quarter from his pants pocket and called heads. It landed tails. Kanaulu would draw the drug from its vial; Powers would intubate. As the drug took effect, Powers intubated Jones in about 30 seconds. Jones' heart kept beating.

When they arrived at Queen's, Jones was taken to Room 3 of the trauma center. The ambulance crew gave its report to the receiving doctor, walked outside the emergency room and then sat down on a bench. They were shaking. Kurishima, an EMS veteran of nearly 15 years, looked at Kanaulu. "Oh, what a call," he said. Kanaulu went home and drank a few beers. He expected a call anytime to tell him that Jones hadn't survived. "I would say 99.5% of the time, they die," he says. "They bleed out."

Dr. Neil Fergusson, the ER trauma surgeon, repaired Jones' liver, attended to the internal bleeding and then discovered the most life-threatening of all the injuries -- a tear in the descending thoracic aorta. As Jones' luck would have it, Dr. Michael Dang, a UH season ticket-holder for the past 15 years, just happened to be in the hospital finishing up an open-heart surgery. When an angiogram confirmed the tear in Jones' aorta, the noted surgeon was called in to repair the damage.

Dang not only faced the delicate task of fixing the tear, but doing so without Jones forever losing the use of his lower limbs. To perform the surgery, Dang had to clamp off the blood flow to Jones' lower body for about 20-25 minutes -- "relatively fast," says Dang, but long enough for permanent paralysis to occur. Jones lucked out again. The graft worked perfectly. And he could move his legs.

Meanwhile, the two local papers prepared for the worst. "Everybody was getting together special sections because they thought he had died," says UH beat reporter Stephen Tsai of the Honolulu Advertiser. As word of the accident spread, the Queen's switchboard was overwhelmed with calls from well-wishers around the world. His wife, Diane, and their four children, along with Jones' parents and siblings who had flown in from Portland, were there every day. Players rotated in and out of the waiting room. Defensive lineman Wayne Hunter, a transfer from Cal, sat vigilantly in the hospital lobby by himself for a dozen days until they allowed him to see his coach. Timmy Chang said a daily prayer for his coach. And you could have decorated a Rose Bowl float with all the flowers Jones received.

Jones drifted in and out of consciousness for nearly 10 days. Once he awoke, he had so many catheters and tubes running in and out of his body that he groggily asked Wilson, "Am I hooked up to that TV?" Another time, his eyes closed, Jones began muttering, "Who's watching the offensive line?" And every day he would say, "Get me out of here."

Wilson flew home from a real estate convention in Las Vegas when he got the call that Jones, who had been in the hospital for nearly three weeks, was driving everybody crazy at Queen's. He wanted out, and the doctors begrudgingly signed off on his release. To avoid the media, Wilson secretly wheeled Jones from the hospital at night. After helping his buddy into an SUV, Wilson opened the moonroof and Jones took a deep breath of the night air. "It's good to be out here," he said.

How unlikely is it that Jones is alive? What if the accident hadn't happened five minutes from Queen's? What if he hadn't moaned when Kanaulu poked at him? What if he had worn the seat belt? ("That 2-iron would have gone through me like a spear," he says.) What if he had had an adverse reaction to the succinylcholine? What if Dang hadn't been available?

Not long after leaving the hospital, Wilson took him to see what was left of the Lincoln. An amazed Jones couldn't utter a word. But Jones can't quite quit being Jones. He still tools around on one of his two Harleys. He keeps dodging doctor appointments. And if you ask him if he now wears a seat belt while driving, Jones looks down in embarrassment. "Sometimes," he says.

Since the accident, Jones has tried to appreciate the everyday joys of life. He doesn't sweat the small stuff. He barely sweats the big stuff. On the eve of Hawaii's season opener (they beat Montana, 30-12), Jones gathered his team in a hotel meeting room and surprised two walk-ons with full scholarships. It was hard to tell who was happier, Jones or the walk-ons. Then, instead of cranking up the usual Friday evening movie, Jones surprised his team with local musician Henry Kapono, a former UH defensive lineman. The players, hotel room pillows in their laps, clapped and swayed as Kapono sang a little number he wrote just for Jones. It's called "The Warrior," and you could almost see the goose bumps on Jones' arms.

The next day, at War Memorial Stadium on neighboring Maui, Jones kept the pregame speech short and sweet. "All right, guys, we've been waiting for this a long time," he said. "I'm more excited about this than you guys. I can hardly wait to see some of you guys play. Remember: intensity, poise, relax and, most of all, have fun."

Jones said a prayer, and then made his way to the field for the coin toss. Instead of trying to run with his team through the giant inflatable helmet positioned in the end zone, he veered left and walked to the sideline by himself.

Asked what he'll tell his captain to call at midfield, Jones says, "What did John call?"

Kanaulu, the coin-flipping paramedic, had called heads.

Jones didn't hesitate. "Then it's heads."

This article appears in the October 1 issue of ESPN The Magazine.