You could feel Michael Jordan’s pain all over again.

Watching parts 3 and 4 of The Last Dance, I was reminded that the former Tar Heel wasn’t always on top of the basketball world. And cradling his first NBA championship trophy and crying, seeing that again brought a tear to my eye.

That was in his seventh year in the NBA, and the first 6 weren’t easy. Four different head coaches, a bad injury, three losing seasons and, even when the Bulls started to win, a lot of talk that Michael was great but couldn’t win the big one.

Those classic playoff series against the Bad Boy Pistons spawned hatred that, you can see, still exists today. The Bulls lost three straight times to Detroit before sweeping the 1991 Eastern Conference finals, when Isiah Thomas and the Pistons walked off the court without shaking the hands of their conquerors.

Thomas was one of the players who had instigated “freezing” the ball from Jordan during an early NBA all-star game. When Michael watched the clip of the Pistons not congratulating them and Thomas saying “that was the way the game was back then,” MJ got visibly pissed all over again . . . 30 years later.

The Bulls dethroned the rugged Pistons only after Jordan decided to get physically stronger and added 15 pounds of muscle during the off-season, and that’s when his competitiveness made him the bully to his own teammates that we’ll see in the next episodes.

His frustration boiled over before finally having his name mentioned with multiple-time champs Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and he had to keep the team focused through later controversies with Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen and the firing of coach Phil Jackson, when the Bulls were broken up and have never recovered.

So far, it is a riveting ESPN series with enough foul language that an edited G-rated version is being shown on ESPN2. No matter how much we once marveled at Jordan’s athletic and basketball abilities, seeing him soar and drive to the basket again brought back those old goosebumps.

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