For one night, it felt like sports were back.

The debut of the highly anticipated ESPN 30 for 30 documentary “The Last Dance” felt every bit like a live sporting event. You know, sporting events … those things that we had before a global pandemic took a machete to the 2020 sports calendar. In case you forgot, most sporting events were watched from the comfort of your own living room, where you load up on snacks and you’re locked in until it ends.

In 2020, must-see live sports get a ton of hype, and people live-tweet them. The best sporting events dominate your entire Twitter feed and become that thing that you and your buddies can’t wait to talk about the following day.

Episodes 1 and 2 of “The Last Dance” were like a classic early-season nonconference college football showdown. There are must-see moments, viral clips that you know you’ll be seeing for a long time and, most important, buzz.

Sure, we know how “The Last Dance” ends. The story concludes with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls celebrating their 6th NBA championship in 8 years. We know it ends with this rather peculiar understanding that Phil Jackson is gone at season’s end — Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause told him that he could go 82-0 and he still wouldn’t be asked to return — and that one of the greatest dynasties in sports would be broken up.

So why did we watch? And why were we now locked into this like it’s LSU-Florida on CBS? There are 2 answers. The easy answer is duh, there are no live sports and we’re all confined to our homes. Of course we watched. It was a no-brainer for ESPN to move the documentary up 2 months from its original June air date.

The real answer, though, is that with this never-before-seen documentary footage from that 1997-98 season, we don’t fully know what’s coming. Even for those of us who grew up as diehard Bulls fans in the suburbs of Chicago, nobody really knew the inner workings of that team. Before there was social media, there was a Bulls team that was treated like The Beatles, yet they didn’t let people in.

This documentary, already, is on a different level from anything that’s ever been said or written about Jordan’s Bulls. For those who watched it on ESPN, you were treated to multiple, uncut f-bombs by Jordan and Scottie Pippen.

Like with live sports, there were the moments that made you go “did that really just happen?”

You can fill in the blank here with the story about “depends how f — ing bad the headache is!”

Line of the doc.

And that story about Jordan walking into his teammates’ hotel room as a rookie and seeing cocaine and weed for the first time, well, that was top-notch entertainment. Watching a candid Jordan bust out laughing when the producer told him he had heard that team was dubbed “the Bulls traveling cocaine circus” was a side that we never see from him.

Did anybody see that coming?

There were twists and turns in it that even decades removed, still captivated an audience. That is, assuming Twitter is any indication of that.

Speaking of that, “Jerry Krause” was trending in the U.S. within the first 15 minutes. The late former Bulls general manager was, um, not built for the player empowerment era that we live in today. If you didn’t know any better, you would have thought he was the inspiration for Swackhammer, AKA the evil boss who runs Moron Mountain in “Space Jam.”

Even then, we weren’t privy to all of that information about how great the disconnect was between Krause and the rest of the team. We didn’t know that Pippen would get on the bus and shame Krause during their heated contract dispute in the start of the 1997-98 season. The doc also reminded us of something that’s still unfathomable. Pippen was upset because he was the 6th-highest paid player on the Bulls heading into that season (Luc Longley was making more money than one of the top 25 players of all-time). Shoot, the guy was No. 122 in annual salary among NBA players that season.

We’ve never seen anything that really dug into that power struggle. Not to keep coming back to the f-bombs, but Pippen’s line about delaying surgery after the 1996-97 season was eyebrow-raising, to say the least.

“I’m not gonna f— my summer up.”

As someone who watched those Bulls 3-peat championship videos (not DVDs) dozens of times, I can tell you with certainty that “I’m not gonna f— my summer up” never made the cut.

“The Last Dance” reminded us just how raw sports can be. Seeing Pippen and Jordan let those walls come down was something that we, the viewers, felt like we were experiencing for the first time. In order to complement never-before-seen footage of the 97-98 team, you needed those personalities to not hold anything back. So far, so good.

That’s the beauty of the way this was structured. Instead of binge-watching all 10 hours on Netflix — something that I’d totally be doing instead of writing this if all the episodes were available — we’ll get 2 hours of this every Sunday night for the next 5 weeks. We’ll get something to look forward to for a couple of hours once a week that we know will be the talk of the sports world.

This is the closest thing that we have to a live game right now. For the first time in what feels like forever, the sports calendar has appointment viewing. No, it’s not college football. It might not get the competitive juices flowing in the same way, and it won’t force us to spend weekdays debating Playoff rankings (though you could certainly close your eyes and pretend that it’s a long Tom Rinaldi feature). This doc will, however, spark discussion — besides revisiting the Jordan vs. LeBron debate — that we need right now.

Was Jordan even more competitive than we gave him credit for? How much longer could the Bulls have co-existed with a players-first general manager? Will we see anything quite like this ever again?

Those are the things we’ll be talking about this week, and probably for the next month as the rest of the 10-part documentary airs. No matter what sort of connection you had to Jordan and the Bulls, there seemed to be a consensus when 11 p.m. ET hit.

Next Sunday night can’t get here soon enough.