If you took a look at the sideline during a Yeshiva University men’s basketball game at the beginning of this decade, it may have tickled you to see a 6-foot-8 black man among a group of Division III players wearing yarmulkes.

But to those on the court and around the team, he was just Mike.

Condolences came from around the basketball world on Thursday after former Knicks first-round pick Mike Sweetney died at 43. Much has been said about his short-lived NBA career and mental health advocacy, but his time at Yeshiva is more than just a footnote to those within the program.

“He literally just was one of the guys,” Yeshiva head coach Elliot Steinmetz told The Post. “From the outside, I get it. It’s a different look when it’s a bunch of Jewish kids, and you have the [6-foot-8] former NBA African American guy in there.

“But he just he was just one of us.”

Steinmetz first met Sweetney in 2019 through Tamir Goodman, an Orthodox Jewish hoops star whom Sweetney knew from the high school circuit in the Washington, D.C. area. When Sweetney moved to New Jersey and wanted to get into coaching, Goodman introduced him to Steinmetz.

Sweetney stayed with the program until 2022, when he had a full-time job and couldn’t commit to the coaching staff anymore, Steinmetz said. But that didn’t mean it was the end of his care for the program.

“Every year beginning of the season, [he’d text], ‘First game’s coming up, how’s it going?’” Steinmetz said. “‘How’s the team looking? Wishing you guys a great season. Hope to get there for a couple of games.’ Just larger than life in terms of the way he cared about people.”

Sweetney and Steinmetz’s friendship wasn’t over, either.

Steinmetz was in Israel when Hamas attacked Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, 2023. The first text he received that night was from Sweetney, who knew he was in the country and wanted to check if he was safe. Sweetney reached out multiple times over the coming days until he knew Steinmetz had gotten back home safely.

Sweetney reached out again several years later under similar circumstances, when Steinmetz’s son, Noah, was in Israel during an Iranian attack.

“It wasn’t like he wasn’t checking boxes when he reached out to you,” Steinmetz said. “He genuinely cared … just larger than life in terms of the way he cared about people.

“It’s so easy to talk about people when they pass away and how great they were. He’s one of the guys that we talked about him like this when he was alive.”

It’s the kind of care that made him so welcome in the local Jewish community.

Sweetney got his coaching start running Goodman’s basketball camp, the first moment in a career entwined with Jewish basketball. He continued to run camps during the summer and held training sessions at synagogues.

“I’ve gotten 1000s of texts today from people in the Jewish community who are just absolutely heartbroken,” Steinmetz said. “He just was a part of our community, like to a point where I literally have had hundreds of people reach out today asking where they can give money for his family, send something.”

In three seasons with Sweetney on the staff, the Maccabees went 61-5. They cruised into the Division III Sweet 16 in 2020 before the rest of the tournament was canceled due to COVID-19, went a perfect 7-0 in a shortened 2020-21 season and finished his tenure with a tournament berth the following year.

But Steinmetz cares far more to remember who Sweetney was as a person and as a coach than the impact he had on the court.

“He spent the later part of his life really trying to help other people,” Steinmetz said. “It was something that was so key for our guys with everything going on in the world and everything around them. He was just somebody who had been through it that they could always talk to on a level of openness and comfort and trust, and he just was kind of that guy for everybody.”

“The basketball part was irrelevant,” Steinmetz said. “He was obviously great to have around on the basketball side, but he was just-he was so much bigger than that.”