Paul Pressey can still feel the electricity in the building that night. The excitement every time the ball found Kobe Bryant’s hands. The raucous reactions to every made basket.

The final game of Bryant’s legendary career was the Lakers’ regular-season finale at the tail end of a dismal 17-win season. There was a different atmosphere inside Staples Center that night, like there would be a title presentation after the come-from-behind win over the Jazz.

“To see those balloons and all that confetti coming out of the ceiling [at the end of the game], you felt like it was a championship game,” recalled Pressey, an assistant coach with the Lakers for Bryant’s final two seasons. “All the smiling and grinning, giving each other high-fives, it was an emotional time. There’s no other feeling you can imagine when you see that, not knowing that a few years later a tragic thing would happen to such a beautiful life.”

On Sunday, Bryant died at the age of 41, killed in a helicopter accident alongside his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others. Pressey, now a special assistant to St. John’s head coach Mike Anderson, got the news from his son, Phil, who is playing professionally in Madrid.

Soon, all the memories from his two years as a Lakers assistant coach came rushing back. At the top of the list was that last game, when Bryant exploded for 60 points at the age of 37. He sank the game-winning jumper with 31.0 seconds left and added two free throws to reach 60 for the fifth time in his storied career, rallying the Lakers from a 14-point, fourth-quarter deficit.

“I was in tears, I was crying for him [on the bench],” said Pressey, 61, who played in the NBA for more than a decade with the Spurs, Warriors and Bucks. “I was in awe, to see him do that at his age with the injuries he had in the past. Every shot, you were rooting for him. You were just so amazed he was still doing it at such a high level. … In his mind, in his heart, it was his final championship game, and he played that way.”

What stood out the most on that night, though, was how badly everyone wanted Bryant to go out in such memorable fashion. The Lakers had a young team that included four rookies and three second-year players. It wasn’t a memorable season. They lost 65 games. But that night, everyone was on the same page — everyone determined to make it a game that would be part of Bryant’s legacy.

“They deferred to him on every play,” Pressey said. “They set screens for him. They made sure he got the ball. When they rebounded the ball, they were looking for him to get the ball. They were saying, ‘This is your night.’ To see his teammates do that for him, it made it more special for him, because when the game was over with, you could see his teammates jumping for joy like, ‘Wow, he’s still got it.’ ”

There were so many other fond memories Pressey had of Bryant, a five-time NBA champion and the league’s fourth all-time leading scorer. There was his pregame ritual, when he would palm an extra-large basketball in team meetings. He would have this steely focus before games that was always the same, Pressey remembered. When they first met, Pressey was prepared to pick Bryant’s brain, but it worked the other way around. Bryant wanted to know what it was like to play in the NBA in Pressey’s day, back in the 1980’s.

One practice, in particular, stood out. The Lakers were scrimmaging, and Bryant didn’t like the effort level of his teammates. He didn’t yell or scream. He didn’t belittle them. At one point, Bryant stopped the scrimmage, rhetorically asking the other Lakers if that was all they had. Another time, he questioned their defensive effort.

“He was not talking trash, he was talking to these guys to motivate them, that, ‘You got to be better than what you are now,’ ” Pressey recalled. “He was always very direct, always talking on and off the court.”

Pressey hasn’t coached in the NBA since leaving the Lakers following the 2016 season. After two years away from the game, he joined Anderson, his college teammate at Tulsa, at St. John’s. Three events from his over three decades in the league stand out. When he was drafted by the Bucks in the first round in 1982, when he won an NBA title as an assistant coach with the Spurs in 1999 and the two years coaching Kobe Bryant.

“I was truly, truly blessed to experience my time with Kobe,” Pressey said. “At the end of the day, he set an example for all of us — do all you can while you can. That’s what Kobe stood for.”