Lost among the multitude of injured players strewn about the women’s tennis tour is the fact that Justine Henin-Hardenne has won all but three of her matches this season. At 31-3, she has won a Grand Slam, along with three other tournaments. Her only losses came at the hands of Maria Sharapova in her first tournament of the year in April, to Eleni Daniilidou (improbably) in the first round of Wimbledon, and then Sunday against fellow Belgian Kim Clijsters in the final of the Rogers Cup in Toronto.

Henin-Hardenne’s record is more astonishing in that the former world no. 1 hardly ever plays for more than two months at a stretch. Her season began in April and gradually progressed through the French Open, which she won, in the first week of June. Then after losing at Wimbledon, she took another six weeks off. More than a year after recovering from a debilitating virus and several nagging injuries, Henin-Hardenne seems resigned to playing less often to maintain her health. She has even taken to wearing bandages on her right hamstring, a persistent problem in the past, as a precaution.

The lack of matches causes her to struggle with her timing and consistency; both were suspect on Sunday in her 7-5, 6-1 loss to Clijsters on a windy afternoon. Still, the fact that Henin-Hardenne continues to win with such regularity – and can string together as many brilliant points as she did against Amelie Mauresmo in the Rogers Cup semifinal – is remarkable. How does she do it?

Confidence is, by far, her greatest asset, and it does not seem to diminish with time off. No matter how little time she spends on the court, Henin-Hardenne plays within an inch of the lines. Generally, this is not an advisable strategy, as Robby Ginepri, the meandering American who just completed a wonderful summer after learning that less can be more, can attest.

For Henin-Hardenne, though, aggression is never the enemy. If she sees a chance to fire a ball into a corner, she takes it, usually following it to the net, where her volleys are crisp and her overhead smooth. And it’s of no consequence if she overplays her hand and drops a few games or a set. Henin-Hardenne sticks to the plan, and if she loses, so be it. At times, the results are ugly – witness the forehands she framed Sunday as Clijsters relentlessly pecked away from the baseline – but when it works, few players are as satisfying to watch. Henin-Hardenne is a master tactician, and there is no shot she cannot execute when her game is working.

Things were not always this way. Over the last four years, Henin-Hardenne probably has changed – and improved – her game more than any other woman on the tour. Everyone knows Henin-Hardenne for her backhand, which, in terms of technique, could very well be the best in tennis, men or women. Her forehand, however, is now her weapon of choice rather than the passable stroke that it once was.

Compare Henin-Hardenne’s swing and follow-through to that of Lindsay Davenport. Davenport uses her size and strength to drive through the ball and often follows through over her head, her shoulders turning fully, but not in an exaggerated fashion. Henin-Hardenne’s swing relies much more on torque. She starts in the now commonplace open stance, with her right shoulder behind her, but by the time she finishes, the right shoulder is often past perpendicular to the net, having rotated more than 180 degrees.

It’s an explosive swing, long and susceptible to error-inducing kinks, yet Henin-Hardenne mostly keeps it under control. That Henin-Hardenne, not quite 5-feet-6 inches tall and weighing 126 pounds, can generate so much pace is a worthy subject for a physics laboratory.

More than a fearsome forehand, Henin-Hardenne has adopted a fearless attitude, no matter how infrequently she plays. There simply is no other woman in tennis – and few men – willing to play so forcefully at tense moments. Built like a clay-court player, Henin-Hardenne insists on pushing her opponents around rather than being a pusher who waits for an opponent’s mistake. Without doubt, this remarkable trait often gets her into trouble: We are hard pressed to find a woman in history who won as consistently as Henin-Hardenne yet so often needed three sets to do it. Of her 34 matches, 15 have gone the distance (she is 13-2 in those matches). Clijsters, in comparison, has played three sets eight times in 54 matches. Her overall record is 49-6; in three-set matches she is 5-3.

Henin-Hardenne’s mood swings – beautiful, even exhilarating tennis one moment, followed by the sort of slop we saw in her second set on Sunday – will likely continue in the near term, and maybe longer. If she has any fear, it seems to be of playing too often, of wearing down her body with the gruesome combination of taxing training sessions, for which she has become known, and a slew of tournaments. Yet if she does not play a bit more, she runs the risk of remaining on the court too long during early rounds, which hurts her chances of winning (she reminded us of this on Sunday when she complained about not being fresh enough against Clijsters).

For all her admirable qualities, Henin-Hardenne can hardly be called a gracious loser. There is usually a compliment to her opponent, followed by an excuse (this time, she was tired, and it was windy). At Wimbledon, she was depleted from winning the French Open. At last year’s U.S. Open, the Olympics had drained her. This year, however, there’s little room for excuses. The field is hurting (five of the top eight seeds dropped out of Toronto) and Henin-Hardenne, whose ranking dropped to seven after her loss to Clijsters, showed a lot of promise this past week. If she can win a few matches in two sets, she should be in a position to win her fifth Grand Slam event when the final weekend arrives in Flushing.