This was the perfect way to kick off a basketball year that quite possibly might be unlike any other in the long and beautiful history of The City Game.

This was Thursday morning, inside a packed gym at the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School in the South Bronx — one of the great experiments of education in our city, one that in five short years has already made a dramatic impact on students, teaches and supporters alike.

Here was the great Bill Bradley — onetime rival, onetime teammate and forever friend of the man for whom this school is named — talking about Pearl, taking about the school, talking about all the things that make this game such an important thread in the tapestry of New York City.

“The fact that it has Earl Monroe on the [school] name, that might be a little reason why I’m here, but you guys are the reason that makes my heart full,” Bradley said on the occasion of the opening of the new 69,000-square-foot facility that will now house the school, which opened in 2021. “Earl is the reason of my heart, because he is in my heart. When you are a teammate and you go to the top, it’s a forever bond and we did that twice.”