You've probably heard the story about the one that got away - how, in 1979, young Bill Gates yanked his business out of Albuquerque and took it to Seattle.

Biz folks tell the tale while wringing their hands about how New Mexico doesn't take care of its own. Too bad they don't tell stories about the ones that stayed.

Here's my favorite: Cheryl Willman, a rising star for the Mayo Clinic, visited Albuquerque in 1981. Like a lot of us, she was smitten.

"I was hit by the sky and the air," she says, her voice soft as a lullaby. "I felt a spiritual connection."

A year later, she left potential stardom and joined the University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Center. Minus a few years at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in - ahem - Seattle, she built a solid reputation for cancer research and treatment at UNM.

But in 1999, that Seattle center began wooing her. She was so tempted. Loved Seattle. Knew she'd excel there. Wanted to ride a career rocket.

One of her mentors, Leonard Napolitano, who founded the med school in 1969, had retired. There were problems throughout the system. And Seattle was calling.

But then Paul Roth, now the executive vice president of the Health Sciences Center, offered her a bump: director of the Cancer Research and Treatment Center. He and Napolitano told her: "We need you. They don't. What's more important: your ego and what you can do in your career or what you can do for the people of New Mexico?"

Willman and her husband did what they always do when faced with a difficult decision. They drove to Hurricane's Drive-In on Lomas, ordered up a sack of green chile cheeseburgers and took them to Roosevelt Park.

"I was sobbing," she says.

But she took a stand to stay. Maybe it was the chile.

"Hurricane's has a meaning for me," Willman says, laughing. "They don't know it, but they could put me in an ad."

Since taking her stand, Willman has turned the cancer center into a national gem. Employing a style that would challenge a big-time college basketball recruiter, she snared 41 doctors from places like M.D. Anderson, Sloan-Kettering, Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic.

They have charted research leaps that in the past year alone include developing a possible vaccine for the human papillomavirus and discovering a protein that binds to estrogen in breast cancer, which could lead to breakthroughs in chemotherapy.

"Some people say that's the most important discovery in breast cancer last year," Willman says.

The center also does research on every case of childhood leukemia in the nation - work that guides treatments that have led to some of the highest success rates in the cancer field.

In September, the center became the 61st cancer and research center to be designated by the National Cancer Institute. Not that many people in New Mexico noticed.

"When I go to places nationally, I get, `Oh, my God, you got that,' " Willman said. "New Mexicans don't get what a big deal it is, although eventually they will."

In five years, the center will apply for the cancer institute's comprehensive status - mumbo-jumbo perhaps, but it translates to big bucks, $30 million on top of the center's $63 million budget.

Willman plans to snag that level of acclaim by setting up outreach clinics in Las Cruces and Farmington, hiring more doctors, generating more research and, best of all, building a cancer treatment center off University Boulevard.

It promises to be a gleamer, with free valet parking for patients (not doctors), meditation rooms, day care for patients' children and a sweep of chemo rooms that gaze upon the Sandia Mountains.

Gates might have found riches beyond compare by moving to Seattle, but Willman found something far different by staying.

"I'm a better person now, because the work I'm doing isn't about me," she says. "It's about the people I'm doing it for. I feel fortunate to have made that transition, because I don't think many people do."

That's almost worth a toast. Maybe over a sack of green chile cheeseburgers.