Using arcoy to connect to a remote SDE instance... how to?

We are using Python v2.6 and have a situation where we need to connect to a remote SDE instance to look at some data. All of the examples that I have found online are using a local copy of a .sde file that was generated from a connection created in ArcCatalog. We don't have that capability, meaning that we won't have such an sde file to look at to make the connection. Is there another way to create some object where we pass in all of the connection information and then go from there? Or is the only way to use Python to connect to an SDE instance is to have a local .sde file.

Thanks - Peter