Alex English, George Karl and a band of Nuggets brothers grabbed a slice of pizza, hopped in a time machine and traveled back to the NBA of the 1980s.

Their mission?

Give one more, forever-lasting hug to Doug Moe, the once and future King of the Dips.

“The best — and only — coaching advice Doug ever gave me?” former Nuggets assistant coach and longtime Moe confidant Bill Ficke said Monday, while we sat at a table in his suburban Denver restaurant.

“He used to say, ‘Fick, when you go in the locker room and try to coach up the players, always remember one thing: After two minutes, nobody’s listening.’”

The late great Nuggets coach, whose 432 victories are celebrated on a banner in the rafters of Ball Arena, passed away in February at the feisty old age of 87.

Early last week, nearly 100 of his former Nuggets players, staff sidekicks and local media wretches joined Moe’s wife, the irrepressible Big Jane, at Big Bill’s New York Pizza on a beautiful Colorado afternoon to raise a glass and fondly roast the late, great coach.

If Moe liked you, his standard greeting began with a crude term of endearment:

“Hey, dip (bleep), how ya doin’?”

He was a self-proclaimed Big Stiff and proud of it. An overachiever. Just like his Denver teams from 1980-90, when the Showtime Lakers ruled the West but the Nuggets played basketball more colorful than their rainbow skyline uniforms. 

When I asked English to give me one anecdote to describe a relationship with Moe for which he’s eternally grateful, the Hall of Fame player fondly recalled a game against Dallas. It wasn’t a 40-point night for English. It was a combative timeout when he and Moe cursed at each other like sailors, yelling a creative combination of swear words to put the exclamation points on their debate.

“He hollered at me. I hollered back at him. That was the first time in our long tenure together that we ever argued. He went off. I was taken aback… It was intense,” English said.

“It took more than a minute to get over it. But we met at a little Mexican grill at the corner of University Boulevard and Evans. Before breakfast was done, we were back on civil speaking terms. That was Doug. He couldn’t stay mad.”

In a high-scoring, motion offense with no set plays, these three words were always Moe’s best coaching advice, shouting in a soprano screech from the Denver bench:

“Take him, Alex!”

Moe put the cool in old school. Before the league and its stars became a corporate brand, he was the perfect coach for when the NBA was still a bawdy, renegade game.

He was happily rumpled, unapologetically profane, politically incorrect, perpetually upbeat and a math genius ahead of his time in basketball analytics.

Although he never won a championship ring, Moe got up more shots and had more fun than anybody. Take that, Pat Riley!

“Poppy was so competitive to the very end,” said Doug Moe Jr., a financial planner in Texas. “In the last few years, we’d go to lunch almost every day in San Antonio and do nothing but have knockdown, drag-out arguments about players on our fantasy football and baseball teams.”

While longtime loyalists to Nuggets Nation remember Moe ranting like a madman during games until forward Calvin Natt would turn and calmly say “Shut up, Doug,” my image of the coach is lounging for hours in a hotel coffee shop on the road, always making more room at the table for everybody to feel welcome and seen.

“On my second day of a summer vacation trip to Hawaii with my wife, the landline in my hotel room rings,” said Mike Evans, a staple of Denver’s backcourt rotation in the 1980s.

The voice from Denver didn’t have time for pleasantries.

“Mike?” Moe barked into the phone. “It’s Doug.”

“Coach?” Evans replied, surprised to hear from Moe. “How you doin’?”

“I’m good,” Moe said. “But you need to get your (butt) back to Colorado. Now.”

Evans stammered: “What do you mean? I’m in Hawaii. On vacation. What’s going on?”

Moe cut straight to the chase: “We’ve got a new general manager. He’s not a big fan of mine. And he’s not a big fan of yours. You need to come home, go play in the summer league and show this GM what you can do. There will be a plane ticket waiting for you tomorrow.”

Evans didn’t utter another word of protest. Smart choice.

He won the approval of general manager Vince Boryla, and with a friendly assist from his coach, Evans went on to appear in more than 400 games, scoring 3,642 points for the Nuggets as a sharpshooter off the bench.

All I owe Moe is my entire career.

Way back in 1983, weeks after being hired to write sports in Denver, I was assigned to follow the Nuggets on a single road trip.

After a game in Atlanta, I hit the town with two buddies who toasted my new job, way too many times and deep into the night.

Painfully hungover, I missed the Nuggets’ commercial flight to Milwaukee. After frantically rebooking, I sat on the plane with my head in my hands, worried that if I missed that night’s contest, it might well result in a pink slip.

Shortly after take-off, somebody walking down the aisle shook me from my brain fog with a slap on the shoulder.

“Hey dip (bleep)!” Moe declared. “What are you doing here? Did you miss the team plane, too?”

His excuse was better than mine. Moe was returning to Denver, serving a suspension from the league office for angrily instructing his Nuggets to stand still on the court and quit even pretending to play defense late in a game against Portland.

After telling me I looked terrible at least five times, Moe gave me what proved to be an exclusive, butt-saving interview on his suspension.

A few years ago, when I thanked Moe for his kindness in a cub reporter’s moment of duress, he looked generally perplexed.

“Oh, (bleep). How did I make that mistake?” said Moe, grinning like a cat that ate the canary. “You really are a no-hoper.”

The kindness Moe showed this knucklehead was his superpower as a coach. His heart was filled with the generosity to look past the no-hoper and give the best in all of us a chance to shine.

The ability to motivate is more priceless than all the X’s and O’s ever scrawled during a timeout.

“I’ve never met one person in my entire life that made me say: ‘You know what? He reminds me of Doug Moe.’ There’s never been anybody like him,” said Tommy Sheppard, a Washington Wizards front-office executive for 20 years  after starting his NBA journey as the publicity director for the Nuggets.

As the celebration of Moe’s life came to a close, Lisa Johnson gently put a hand on my right arm. Johnson, who currently serves as the Nuggets vice president of basketball administration, has been the living, breathing history of the team since 1981.

“I’ve never told anyone this story,” Johnson began.

On the September day in 1990 when the Nuggets fired him, Moe showed up at a press conference to announce his own dismissal while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He popped open champagne and giddily toasted the idea of getting paid to do nothing.

The scene was so very Dougie. On his toughest day as coach, the Big Stiff was defiant and irreverent, hilarious and heartfelt.

But only moments before he faced the TV cameras, Moe sat alone in the McNichols Arena locker room when Johnson walked in.

“Doug took one look at me and broke down crying,” Johnson recalled.

“So I gave him a hug and we cried it out. Then he told me: ‘Now I’m ready. But don’t you dare tell anybody about me crying.’ He stood up, smiled and said: ‘Let’s go do this.’”

When you think about it, ain’t that the real secret of great coaching?

Douglas E. Moe, a proud son of Brooklyn born in 1938, spread more laughter than almost anybody in basketball for nearly nine decades.

Between all the shared smiles, he made us believe we were capable of doing almost anything, even something as hard as saying goodbye.