Jalen Suggs drilled jumpers. He split defenders. He threw alley-oops. He picked pockets.

The high school seniors sharing the court at the open run were background noise beside a sixth grader set to land his first college scholarship offer.

“The [Wisconsin-Milwaukee] assistant came over to me and asked what grade he’s in,” said Suggs’ father, Larry. “He said, ‘No way he’s in the sixth grade. I came to Minnesota looking for a player and the best player I found is in the sixth grade.’

“He said, ‘Can I get you down for a visit next weekend?’”

Suggs’ age has always been irrelevant. Last week, Gonzaga’s star 19-year-old freshman used the final eight minutes of the West Coast Conference championship to present his case as the country’s top talent, recording 11 points — including late back-to-back 3-point daggers — three rebounds, two assists and a block in that span to almost single-handedly turn a seven-point deficit into a 10-point win over BYU.

Suggs would save the top-ranked team’s undefeated season. The projected top-five NBA Draft pick would taste what he’s always craved.

“When the lights are shining the brightest and more people are watching, I always want to go out and make plays,” Suggs said afterwards. “I told Coach [Mark Few]….‘We’re not walking out of here without a championship. I’m gonna get it done.’

“I kept screaming, ‘It’s March! It’s March!’ I’ve been waiting to play in these moments in March my entire life.”

Suggs — whose No. 1 overall seed Bulldogs (26-0) continue their quest for their first national championship Saturday night against No. 16 Norfolk State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament — is a second-team All-American, the likely catalyst if champagne finally floods the streets of Spokane, Wash. The 6-foot-4 point guard will be the second-ever one-and-done player at Gonzaga, a genetic cocktail of speed, strength and selflessness who sees needles in haystacks and throws passes with a paintbrush.

Prodigies make anything seem possible.

“I knew he’d be good at 2 years old. He could shoot and dribble, like for real, and he already had the movements down,” said Larry, a former guard at Valley City State University. “At 4, he played 10-year-old basketball. One day, one of the kids on my team was late, and I ended up having to throw him in the game. He’s hitting jumpers and they’d be screaming, ‘Who’s got the 4-year-old? Who’s got the 4-year-old?’ We’d laugh, but he had a high IQ and understanding of the game, timing and spacing.

“By the time he hit fourth grade, he understood if you make everyone else better, then everyone else loves you. He helped so many of his buddies get Division I scholarships.”

Urban Meyer told Suggs he was “one of a kind” then handed the high school sophomore a scholarship offer to quarterback Ohio State.

A four-year varsity starter, Suggs led the SMB Wolfpack (a team comprising players from multiple neighboring high schools) to a state football championship as a junior and returned to the title game as a senior. In his final year, the dual-threat threw for 2,213 yards and 25 touchdowns, ran for 978 yards and 12 scores, and notched nine interceptions as a part-time defensive back.

“He was also the best free safety in the state,” head football coach Chris Goodwin said. “He would just run right over guys, just annihilate them. There was no one like him.”

Suggs was the first person to win Minnesota’s Mr. Football and Mr. Basketball awards in the same season. He envisioned he would be this generation’s Charlie Ward. Roughly two dozen schools offered him that opportunity.

Gonzaga could not.

“Knowing that Gonzaga was my main school basketball-wise I wanted to go to and didn’t have a football team, it wouldn’t be like Florida or Florida State, Minnesota, Iowa State, where I could go over to the football complex, try it out, see if it could work,” Suggs told The Post. “That’s part of the reason why I did it, so I can focus on what I needed to do. But it was really hard to actually come to the realization that I wouldn’t be playing it anymore. There were definitely times [this fall] where I thought, ‘What if I went and played, if I were out there running around?’”

Suggs had been taking snaps since he was a 5-year-old shaking off blind-side hits in a 10-year-old tackle football league. But it became clear that basketball could pay more bills.

In this year’s College Football Playoff, Suggs likely would have been on the bench, behind Justin Fields on Ohio State’s depth chart. In this year’s Final Four, Suggs could be the marquee attraction, granted the sport’s grandest stage.

“Not until someone told us he would be a guaranteed lottery pick did we change the thinking, knowing it’d take five years to earn this much money in football, and basketball you could earn it right away as a one-and-done,” Larry said. “We all had to sit down as a family and talk about it, and it was tough. He cried for a week. Someone tells you that you can’t do something you love for the rest of your life, it’ll break you down. But after he thought about it, he understood. It’s just business. It’s a job at the next level.”

Suggs was in third grade when Iowa basketball coach Fran McCaffrey spied him at a multi-age event and referred to him as “LeBron James.” In fifth grade, Suggs — whose father founded an AAU team with seed money from his cousin, Terrell, the seven-time NFL Pro Bowler — won his second straight AAU national championship. In seventh grade, Suggs became Minnehaha Academy’s varsity starting point guard.

As a senior, Suggs chased a fourth straight state title, helping draw more than 17,000 people to Target Center for a matchup against Bronny James and Sierra Canyon High School. Suggs left with 23 points, 12 rebounds, six assists and six steals in a blowout win of the nationally-ranked opponent.

“How he handled himself with the press, with fans, he was so articulate and patient after games,” head coach Lance Johnson said. “We’d have to wait in opposing teams’ gyms so he could sign autographs. He never once said, ‘This is getting old’ or ‘I don’t like this’ or ‘I don’t have time for this.’”

Pacific Standard Time struggles making new friends. Most people don’t see much of Gonzaga until March. But in Saint Paul, the Bulldogs’ consistently late time slot found little competition on the Suggs family’s TV.

“If you love watching basketball, you’re gonna watch that 11 o’clock game, so when Jalen was little, he’d be dribbling in the living room and we’d watch Gonzaga games,” Larry said, before explaining why his son went west. “It came down to style of play. I wanted a faster pace. I was looking for a lot of ball screens, which you run in the NBA. And I wanted him to be around a group of guys who love to play and share the ball. We weren’t looking for the superstar hype stuff. We were looking for the best situation.”

When Few became Gonzaga’s head coach in 1999, the school had only ever produced one first-round draft pick (John Stockton). There have been seven of them since then, including five since 2013.

Suggs is the first to start as a freshman.

“Being a football player, you knew the physicality wasn’t going to bother him,” Few said. “With his vision and his feel for the game, he had it. He’s got a supreme belief that he can slide the ball into any small windows.”

Suggs alternates between Aaron Rodgers and Chris Paul, enhancing what was already the country’s most beautiful brand of basketball. Beginning with a season-opening 24-point, eight-assist, two-steal, one-turnover outing against Kansas, the two-way star has averaged 14.3 points, 5.5 rebounds, 4.5 assists and 2.0 steals.

Jay Hillock — Stockton’s former Gonzaga coach and a longtime NBA scout — has long believed Suggs could be the highest draft pick in school history (Adam Morrison, third overall in 2006).

“Immediately I thought of Jason Kidd,” Hillock said.

Sometimes, Suggs catches himself wondering what next season will be like, picturing himself as a rookie matching up with the superstars he used to emulate.

Then he stops. You can only have one dream at a time.

“It’s impossible not to think about [the NBA] at all. It’s definitely come across my mind, but my main focus has been trying to stay in the moment,” Suggs said. “The more you look into the future and worry about those things, you lose sight of what’s going on right now and truth be told, we’re in the middle of a special season.”