So, yeah, John Tesh says. The origin story for “Roundball Rock” is real.

“I woke up in the middle of the night, got an idea,” he said from his home last week.

He was, at the time, in a hotel room in France when he woke up. It was 2 a.m. and he didn’t have a tape recorder with him. Being the early ’90s at the time, he didn’t have a cell phone, either. So, not wanting to forget the idea in his head before he fell asleep, he did the only thing he could think of — he called his house, where they used to have these things called “answering machines,” in case you weren’t home when somebody called — in which case, you’d leave a message. So, Tesh left a message on his own machine.

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“I called my answering machine, and when I got back to the States, checked the messages, put the answering machine on my piano, figured out what that was,” Tesh said. “So those two sections, those key sections — da da da da da – da da da, and then de de de de, de de, where the strings come in, that’s exactly like that, in the same key that I sang it (into the answering machine). But the key is, understanding, having lived in those television trucks with the edits, understanding what the template needed to be. And you can hear this in the song.

“There’s a fanfare that happens, and then there’s what’s called a ‘handoff,’ where the trumpets will hand off to the strings, and then the strings take it to the next level. But then, you have to have a breakdown section, because that’s when Marv (Albert)’s going to come in, and go ‘Today, Oklahoma City versus Milwaukee.’ And then the theme comes back, and finishes.”

What started as a few notes sung into a machine would become one of sports’ most iconic theme songs.

Three-plus decades later, “Roundball Rock” is as synonymous with the NBA as Johnny Pearson’s “Heavy Action” is with “Monday