SAN JOSE — Most anyone could tell you that 14-year-old Loukas Angelo was crazy about socks.

Socks printed with smiley faces and doughnuts. Socks with cats and flowers, dinosaurs and alien landscapes.

But what those closest to him appreciated most wasn’t his sense of style. It was his wry sense of humor. It was his selflessness that made him seem older than his years, as well as his pride in his hard-won accomplishments.

The Archbishop Mitty High School freshman was declared brain-dead Friday night, two days after being hit by a car while crossing Mitty Way from a preseason basketball conditioning session. In what his family called “his final gift,” his organs were donated early Sunday morning. He would have turned 15 in October.

“In my eyes, he was one of those friends who was always authentic,” said Joseph Vaughn, a San Jose friend since their prekindergarten days at Hillbrook School in Los Gatos.

By the fourth grade, the two boys had bonded intensely over their love of basketball. They played daily at recess and later joined their school team and then outside competitive basketball leagues.

“He was one of those players who was really good but didn’t just take the ball like LeBron James,” said the 15-year-old. “He passed the ball to others so they could score.”

Still, the two competed with each other and from their fifth-grade through eighth-grade seasons kept track of the points they scored on the court, hoping to break the school record, which Joseph said was close to 400. But as their final season was winding down last year, Joseph realized he didn’t have many games left to break the record. That’s when Loukas started passing him the ball as much as possible in the remaining games.

“He could have had probably 20 or 50 more points that season, and he gave them to me,” Joseph said. “He knew how much the record meant to me.”

Like Joseph, Surya Chandra and Loukas gravitated to each other as youngsters at Hillbrook, where they played sports and, over the years, regularly checked to see who was taller. Loukas, he said, was one of the funniest people he’d ever met.

But this fall, Surya, 14, started at Bellarmine College Prep, so the two hadn’t been in touch for a few weeks. So last weekend, ﻿they decided to meet up at a Mitty football game and hang out afterward. Surya, who lives in Saratoga, still chuckles over the memory of arriving at the game and making eye contact with Loukas.

“He looked and smiled, then started to walk away,” Surya recalled.

Loukas, he said, would continually duck out of sight, hiding behind people in the crowd, but always checking to make sure Surya knew where he was. After several minutes of the cat-and-mouse game, Loukas stopped and turned to his friend. Then they hugged.

“It’s just really hard for me to accept,” Chandra said of his friend’s death. “Suddenly he’s gone.”

Ella Mulcahy, 15, had known Loukas since she was a toddler and then all the way through Hillbrook.

“I could talk to him about anything,” said Ella, who last saw Loukas when she sat with him Wednesday at lunch at Mitty just hours before the accident.

Loukas would gently tease Ella about everything from soccer (she played, he didn’t) to writing, which both were seriously pursuing.

“It was something he loved to do,” Ella said. “You could tell in his writing and in his thoughts that he was very proud of it, too.”

Ella said she is angry about her friend’s death — and can’t comprehend why it happened. But knowing that the donation of Loukas’ organs will help someone else consoles her.

“I don’t want anybody else to feel this pain,” Ella said. “He can save so many other lives, and other people won’t have to go through what we are all going through now.”

Contact Tracy Seipel at 408-920-5343. Follow her at Twitter.com/taseipel.