I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the Chicago Bulls were my childhood.

They are the reason I became a sports fan and a sports writer.

They were the reason I learned how to read at a young age — thanks to an absurdly large collection of basketball cards that prompted me to read their statistics on the back — and they provided the moments that I’ll never forget with my family. I watched the championship tapes of both 3-peats countless times and I could tell you where every player on those teams went to college. Horace Grant (Clemson) is my favorite athlete of all-time and if you ask my Mom, she’d be happy to dig up photos of me balling on my Little Tikes hoop, goggles and all. To a kid born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1990, the Bulls were everything.

So when I say those words, I mean it. Watching “The Last Dance” hit more childhood nostalgia bones in my body than anything I’ve ever seen.

But as I was reminded while watching episodes 7 and 8 of the “ESPN 30 for 30,” there are still plenty of things that I either forgot about or just never knew.

I highlighted exactly what those 5 things were:

1. MJ’s quote before Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Playoffs

As the great Brian Kenny repeated on SportsCenter, “Michael Jordan said that to lose a game to the (New Jersey) Nets, his team would have to fall asleep.”

Um, wait a minute. The guy said that before the playoffs started?!

Imagine disrespecting an opponent like that for any other human being on planet earth. Or better yet, imagine a quote like that during the social media era.

Jordan said that and it’s a relatively minor detail because, as expected, the Bulls rolled to a 3-game sweep in the best-of-5 series. Sure, New Jersey pushed the Bulls to overtime from the jump, but even after a quote like that, there was no ammo that was going to be enough to fuel the Nets.

The irony is that, as we were reminded later in Episodes 7 and 8, Jordan took whatever someone said about him and turned it into the biggest personal slight possible (more on that later).

2. The story of Jordan’s 1993 retirement broke at an American League Championship Series game

I totally forgot that the White Sox were in the 1993 ALCS (there’s my Cubs bias showing).

But more important, I totally forgot about the fact that when Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf hosted Jordan in his box that night after he threw out the first pitch, the story of his possible retirement leaked and the national media flipped out. You had media members trying to get into Reinsdorf’s box for any sort of comment. An ALCS game for a team who hadn’t won a World Series in 44 years became an afterthought.

CBS reported in the middle of the game that there was a press conference the following day, and that the speculation was that Jordan was about to retire. In the pre-social media era, that’s some fast-traveling news.

Every major news outlet imaginable got on a plane and got to Chicago for a press conference the following day:

All of that happened too fast. Like, too fast for everyone to answer the all-important question. Why? Why did Jordan leave the game after 3 consecutive titles seemingly at the peak of his powers? Speculation ensued about Jordan’s gambling resulting in a 18-month suspension.

That was disputed by several people in the documentary, including the late former NBA commissioner David Stern. The most notable dispute came from Mark Vancil, who followed Jordan for his book “Rare Air.” According to Vancil, he had an exchange with Jordan during the 1992 Olympics that foreshadowed the stunning press conference a year later:

Vancil: So what are you gonna do?

Jordan: “I’m gonna shock the world. I’m gonna quit and go play baseball.”

Vancil: “When?

Jordan: “Well, I’d do it right now but Bird and Magic never won three in a row, and I gotta do the Olympics. But if it wasn’t for that, I’d be playing (baseball) this summer.”

Imagine if the world had known that when Vancil did.

3. Jordan started with a 13-game hitting streak in Double-A

Let’s be clear. For someone to skip 14 years playing baseball to immediately step onto the field and rip off a 13-game hit streak is stunning even for someone who was considered the greatest athlete who ever lived. (He took a couple of days off in between the streak, but still.) The average human being doesn’t realize how difficult it is to hit a baseball, especially after pitchers make that adjustment.

And for Jordan, that’s exactly what happened following his 13-game hitting streak. His former Birmingham Barons hitting coach Michael Barnett said “he did not see a fastball in the strike zone for probably a month and a half.” Yep. If you see a highlight of Jordan playing baseball, chances are, he’s hitting an off-speed pitch. That makes sense.

(Timeout for a shameless plug. Go read Chris Wright’s story on Jordan’s days in Birmingham and why his baseball career was a fascinating struggle.)

Jordan’s baseball career is seen as this strange intermission between his dynasty, and understandably so. The guy was a .202 hitter who struggled to look average both at the plate and in the outfield. Many, myself included, treat Jordan’s baseball career as an itch that he only scratched because of his father’s tragic death.

But man, hearing some of those things is still amazing. Like how Jordan used to get, as he said, “f—–in blisters” on his hands from all the time he spent hitting in the cage before, during and after games. Say what you want about his weaknesses, but he drove in 51 runs and fared far better than some thought he would (Sports Illustrated’s “Bag it, Michael” cover story prompted Jordan to shun the publication forever).

Or there was the quote from manager Terry Francona about how he believed if Jordan could have had 1,500 at-bats in the minors that he could have made his way to the bigs.

Who’s to say he was wrong? Doubting Jordan was the worst thing one could do.

4. The B.J. Armstrong trash talk in Game 2 of the 1998 Eastern Conference semifinals

It’s hard to remember the first few rounds of the playoffs during that second 3-peat because of how dominant that team was. The story of Armstrong’s return to Chicago is peak-Jordan. In Game 2, with the Bulls up 1-0 in the series, Armstrong had a big bucket to seal a win for the Hornets.

And apparently, he let Jordan and Phil Jackson know about it.

So what happened? You can guess it. Jordan, as he reminded everyone in the doc, said that Armstrong should have known better. Jordan outscored Armstrong 27-2 in a Game 3 win, and 2 more easy victories followed.

Jordan was right. Armstrong should have known better because he was the one who shared the “LaBradford Smith story.” Who was that? Someone who spent 3 years in the league and averaged 6.7 points. But on one night in 1993, Smith dropped 37 on the Bulls to fuel a win for the Bullets. As the story was told, Smith found Jordan afterward and said “nice game, Mike.”

The following night, the Bulls flew to Washington, D.C., to play Smith’s Bullets again. Jordan told Armstrong (his teammate at the time) that he was going to match Smith’s 37 from the night before … but he’d get there in the first half. Jordan was wrong. He settled for 36 first-half points that night and 47 for the game.

What’s the best part of the story? Jordan apparently made up the whole “nice game, Mike” thing just to give himself some motivation.

Of course he did.

5. The “Space Jam” pickup games

I’ve always wondered why Jordan agreed to star in a movie in the middle of his playing career. Knowing how psychotic he was about offseason training, that never really made sense to me.

After listening to how it was explained in the doc, well, it made too much sense to me.

In the summer after the Bulls lost to the Orlando Magic in the 1995 Eastern Conference semifinals, Jordan told the Warner Brothers executives that if he was going to be shooting “Space Jam” all day, he needed a place to train. Naturally, they built him his own indoor facility, complete with all the exercise equipment he needed and a full court to play pickup games.

In addition to the players who were there to shoot the movie (Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Shawn Bradley, etc.), Jordan apparently invited a bunch of NBA players for pickup games. Reggie Miller, Juwan Howard, Dennis Rodman, Horace Grant and Chris Mullin were just a few of the star-studded cast of characters who played with Jordan at night after he finished his Space Jam work.

That meant in addition to shooting scenes at Warner Brothers all day and lifting weights, Jordan played several hours of pickup games against the world’s best players (Miller said Jordan “was like a vampire”). Why? Besides the obvious — not knowing how to dial back his competitiveness — Jordan wanted to get in better shape. He invited a bunch of young players out to California so that he could get back to a basketball player’s body instead of a baseball player’s body … and maybe pick up a few things on the competition.

Long story short? It worked. Historically well. Like, 72-10 well.

That’s something nobody will forget.

And about that Gary Payton scene …

Pour one out for “The Glove.” There’s no coming back from that.