With just under 10 seconds to go in Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, the Chicago Bulls found themselves a heartbeat away from a legendary shot.

That’s right: Steve Kerr was about to crash the offensive glass for a put-back that’d go down in NBA history.

“I just remember I had inside position for the rebound on [John] Stockton,” said Kerr — then a sharpshooting guard for the Bulls, now the head coach of the Golden State Warriors — during a scrum with reporters at shootaround before Game 4 of the 2018 NBA Finals in Cleveland. “I beat him baseline and I was going to get the tip, to tip it in.”

When you think about Kerr’s game, tenacious offensive rebounding doesn’t exactly leap to the front of your mind; this is probably because the 6-foot-3 guard grabbed a total of 186 of his teammates’ misses in a 15-year, 910-game NBA career. And yet, with the ball in the air and the season on the line, it was all hands on deck, and the man who’d sunk the Utah Jazz in Chicago one year earlier was preparing to do it again in Salt Lake City.

Twenty years ago today, Michael Jordan shot the game- and championship-winning jumper to beat the Utah Jazz in Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, clinching the Chicago Bulls’ sixth NBA title and his sixth NBA Finals MVP award. (Scott Cunningham/NBAE/Getty Images) More

“It would’ve been my first tip-in of the year,” Kerr said with a smirk. “But I was there.”

As it turned out, Kerr’s services wouldn’t be necessary. Michael Jordan saw to that.

After John Stockton drilled a 3-pointer from the right wing to give Utah an 86-83 lead with 41.9 seconds to go in the fourth quarter, Bulls coach Phil Jackson called a 20-second timeout. For one thing, he wanted to get Kerr in the game, to put an additional shooter on the floor; for another, he wanted to give Jordan a brief respite after Chicago’s centerpiece had played 43 minutes, including all but two minutes of the second half, while serving as the Bulls’ lone consistent generator of offense on a night when Scottie Pippen was locked up by back pain.

At age 35, with 43,360 NBA minutes on his legs, the fate of a franchise on his back, and the dire possibility of a Game 7 on the road with a limited Pippen nipping at his heels, the Bulls needed Jordan to make magic one more time. There wasn’t a single person watching anywhere in the world who doubted his capacity to conjure it.

“It wasn’t just that having Michael Jordan on your side was luxury enough as a Bulls fan,” Kelly Dwyer wrote for this site five years ago. “It was the way you could map out the final seconds of any close contest, with the assurance [even if the shots rimmed out] that a make here, stop there, and make here could turn any three-point deficit in the waning minutes into a win for the red and black. It wasn’t hubris or even misplaced optimism. It was just … Jordan. We had Jordan.”

And so, as he had for most of the previous decade and a half — we’ll always have Birmingham — Jordan went to work.

Out of the timeout, Jackson called an isolation for Jordan, who wasted no time attacking Jazz guard Bryon Russell from the right wing, freezing him with a brief hesitation before bursting past him for a twisting layup that he finished over the outstretched arm of center Antoine “Big Dog” Carr. It was a perfectly executed two-for-one, taking just over four seconds of game time to cut the deficit to one and ensure that Chicago would get another offensive possession, even if the Jazz used the full 24-second shot clock.

On the ensuing trip, the Jazz looked to set up the play that had been their bread-and-butter in Game 6. No, not the fabled John Stockton-Karl Malone pick-and-roll; instead, legendary Jazz coach Jerry Sloan had been rolling with a steady diet of Malone post-ups on the left block, letting “The Mailman” cook Chicago’s overmatched big men to the tune of 31 points on 11-for-19 shooting with seven assists. One possession earlier, it was Malone’s post-up that drew the Bulls’ double-team that left Stockton open for the go-ahead three. This time, though, Jordan saw an opportunity to bring help from the baseline and pounced before Malone even knew he was there.