Michael Jordan’s actual last dance — the encore following the elegant waltz depicted in the just-completed “Last Dance” documentary — came not with championship glory as a Chicago Bull but with irrelevance as a Washington Wizard. And the final discordant notes were sounded on a Wednesday night in Philadelphia, in April 2003.

Jordan, who a season earlier had ended a three-year retirement to cast his lot with the Wiz, would score 15 inconsequential points in a career-ending 20-point loss to the Sixers. And while the mood in the stands that night was celebratory, it contrasted greatly with the one in the Wizards locker room.

“I’m looking forward to it next year, without Michael,” Jerry Stackhouse, a former Sixer early in his 18-year career, said before the game. “The other guys in here might not say so, but they’re looking forward to that challenge, too.”

Washington went 37-45 each of the two seasons Jordan played there. And while he was still productive in his NBA dotage — he turned 40 that final season, when he averaged exactly 20 points a game — the side-show element of his stopover clearly wore on his younger teammates. That was even true of Bryon Russell, who as a member of the Utah Jazz five years earlier had been the defender when Jordan drilled his title-clinching jumper in Game Six of the Finals.

Surely, I suggested to Russell that night in Philadelphia, you will be happy to see Jordan’s career end on a different note than that. It was admittedly a softball question, but Russell seemed intent on charging the mound.

“Why?” he asked testily. “Why do you care if I’m happy about something that happened a long time ago?”

In the hallway outside the locker room, a dapper, gray-haired Wizards assistant coach named Johnny Bach offered the sort of perspective only he was capable of providing. He was 78 then, and at the tail end of the 53rd of 56 seasons he would spend in coaching. He had notably been a Bulls assistant for the first of the two Jordan-led three-peats (1991-93), a defensive mastermind who complemented the work of fellow assistant Tex Winter, the Svengali of the triangle offense.

While Winter’s offense was credited for supplying a modicum of egalitarianism to a Jordan-heavy attack, Bach’s D — the “Doberman Defense,” they called it — was just as much their meal ticket. They unleashed not only Jordan but two other agile, long-armed defenders in Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, and locked teams up, night after night.

Standing in the hallway that night, Bach made it clear he tried to do the same thing in practice, only with Jordan on the other team.

“Every scrimmage day, he’d say, ‘Johnny, what have you got for me?’ ” Bach recalled. “I said, ‘We’re going to trap you, all over the court. … We’ve got (journeyman guard) Pete Myers, and he’s going to play you fullcourt and wear your ass out.’ He said, ‘Bring it on.’ He loved it. He was in the face of Pete Myers, saying, ‘You can’t play me.’

“That’s who the man is.”

That was made abundantly clear throughout the 10-hour documentary. But Bach’s own story did not make the cut — a shame, though understandable; try as he might, director Jason Hehir couldn’t have possibly included everything.

Woulda been a helluva chapter, though. As a naval officer in World War II, Bach sailed into Nagasaki shortly after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on that Japanese city in 1945. As a head coach he spent 18 years at his alma mater, Fordham, and a decade — 1968-78 — knocking his head against the wall at Penn State. (Doesn’t everyone?) He was an assistant on the ill-fated 1972 Olympic team, which lost in controversial fashion to the Soviets. He was a confidante to Jordan and an inspiration to Pippen and Grant, teaching them early in their careers how to compete, how to win.

When Bach died in 2016 at the age of 91, Sam Smith of Bulls.com memorialized him as “one of the truly great Americans of the 20th Century” and “the prototype for the Greatest Generation.” Jordan called him “a great friend,” while Grant remembered him as “a father figure.”

The memories of former Bulls coach Phil Jackson were particularly warm, particularly amusing. He wrote on Twitter that when he arrived in Chicago as an assistant in 1987, he and Bach were responsible for editing the scouting tape the players would view. Bach would intersperse clips of war movies like “Full Metal Jacket.” Jackson, a child of the Woodstock generation, would insert Jimi Hendrix footage.

Yet it worked. Boy did it work, further proof that in any enterprise there is a need for all perspectives. And Bach had that in spades. (Speaking of which, he often drew the Ace of Spades — i.e., the so-called “death card” left on battlefields by U.S. soldiers beginning in World War II — on the blackboard in the Bulls’ locker room following big victories.)

His own reckoning with the end first came on Aug. 15, 1994. He was in Annapolis, he told me over the phone 16 months later, and began experiencing all the symptoms of a heart attack — chest pains, sweating, etc. Couldn’t be, he thought. But it was. Worse, he flatlined on the operating table.

“I certainly entered a different world of intense brightness and silence,” he said. “I felt that I was in flight. I guess the easiest way to describe (it) is that I also saw what I considered my own grave. It was a chilling experience, and a spiritual thing, which I was re-awakened from by a doctor saying, ‘Coach, you’re going to make it.’”

He said he didn’t know how long he was out, how much time he had spent in a different realm.

“All I know is, I had an experience,” he told me. “If I was a disbeliever, I am now a believer, because I know what I saw, and I know what my feelings were. And I know how emotional and spiritual it was.”

Such experiences are often life-changing for those who go through them. They vow not to waste another minute, to wring everything they can out of every day. Certainly Bach had some feelings along those lines, taking up painting afterward and becoming so proficient that his watercolors were once displayed in a gallery in Skokie, Ill. 

But really, he had already lived a full life by then. Was it even possible to make it any fuller? As a military man he had already seen the devastation in Nagasaki (“When you looked out there was nothing,” he told me. “Virtually nothing.”) As a coach he had already experienced the highs of the Jordan Era, the lows of the Olympic experience and everything in between.

He had just left the Bulls when he suffered his heart attack. He would go on to serve as an assistant in Charlotte, Detroit and Washington — the latter two stops while working under Doug Collins, who had been the head man when he came to the Bulls in 1986. Bach then finished up with three years back in Chicago, ending in 2006.

A few years later, Collins became the Sixers coach (albeit without Bach alongside him). After every victory Collins would designate a player the Ace of Spades. The beat guys tended to roll their eyes after a while: Did he mean the “Ace of Speights,” (after a flaky forward named Marreese Speights, a.k.a. “Mo Buckets”)?

Really, though, there could be no better tribute to a hoops lifer like Johnny Bach. To a guy who served long and served well. To a guy who always, always, always saw life’s full picture and appreciated its many hues. And to someone whose last dance was as long and graceful as can be.