On Aug. 26, the night that the NBA shut down after the Milwaukee Bucks’ protest, laughter and singing echoed across Lago Dorado, the lake in the middle of Disney’s Coronado Springs resort.

Amid the uncertainty of the season’s resumption following a tense players-led meeting, a group of players — the Balkan Boys, as they later called themselves — went to dinner on the outdoor patio at the Three Bridges Bar & Grill at Villa del Lago around 8 p.m.

“It was a crazy night full of emotions,” the Heat’s Goran Dragić told The Athletic. “We didn’t know how it was gonna turn the next day.”

The dinner featured players from several Balkan countries: Serbia (Nikola Jokić and Boban Marjanović), Slovenia (Luka Dončić, Dragić and Vlatko Čančar) and Montenegro (Nikola Vučević).

Ivica Zubac and Mario Hezonja (Croatia) and Jusuf Nurkić (Bosnia and Herzegovina) weren’t there the first night, but they joined the group the next day for brunch and then two days later for a dinner

On that first night, the group longed for familiarity and comfort — and a little bit of fun.

Dinner turned into drinks. Drinks turned into playing music from their phones while locking arms and belting Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian songs, including “Slavija” by Džej and “Ne Moze Nam Niko Nista” by Mitar Miric, seemingly every few minutes.

They weren’t the only players unwinding by going out and eating and drinking in the bubble that night, but they were certainly the loudest.

“We transformed the restaurant to a club,” Dragić said.

With no ćevapi (a popular Balkan dish of grilled minced meat, often made with beef or lamb) or rakija shots available, the group settled for sliders and rounds of Stellas.

The natives of the former Yugoslavia, clad in T-shirts, basketball shorts and sneakers and slides, conversed in Serbian and Croatian, discussing life in the bubble, family updates amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of the basketball teams and leagues from their respective countries.

Most of all, though, there was playful shouting and jokes.

The quick-witted banter was led by Jokić and Marjanović, the two entertainers of the rowdy bunch.

“Jokić is a jokester,” Zubac told The Athletic. “He’s the one always making jokes. Boban is always making jokes, too. Pretty much everyone is like that, but they’re the most. They’re always trying to make some jokes about other guys.”

The ribbing included Jokić and Marjanović roasting each other.

The Serbian centers, who grew up roughly 250 miles apart and spend months in the offseason back home, have developed a buddy-cop-like chemistry through their years of friendship.

“Jokić and Bobi, they are the two funniest dudes,” Dragić said. “Especially because they basically tease each other most of the time. They go back and forth. We were just laughing all night.

“I even told (Marjanović), ‘Bobi, I know what you’re gonna do after the career. You’re gonna work on TV, for sure.’”

Luka Dončić and Nikola Jokić have a chat before a game in March 2019.  (David Zalubowski/ AP Photo)

Meanwhile, Dončić, the youngest member of the group at just 21 years old, is on the other end of the personality spectrum.

The Mavericks star is reserved in nature. But with a group he’s more familiar with, he eventually opens up. Like his game, Dončić’s barbs are efficient.

“Luka is calm,” Dragić said. “He’s calm. He’s a little bit quiet. But he would listen and then he would just shoot one, and then everybody would laugh.”

The group stayed out until 2 a.m., singing and drinking for nearly six hours.

“I heard they were out pretty late,” Zubac said.

The next morning, the players attended the meeting to vote on the fate of the season. After it was determined that the playoffs would resume, the group coordinated a brunch in its group text, adding Zubac, Nurkić and Hezonja to the mix.

At brunch, they picked up where they left off from the previous night with loud conversations and music, though the scene was tamed down given the daytime setting.

At a nearby table sat Portland Trail Blazers head coach Terry Stotts, who was game-planning for Game 5 against the Los Angeles Lakers. Nurkić, spotting his coach, asked him to take a group photo.

With a photo tweet and a creative caption from Nurkić, the Balkan Boys nickname was born.

“I like it,” Zubac said of the nickname. “I hadn’t heard before, but it’s cool. We’re all good friends and we’re all from the Balkans, so I don’t see a problem with it.”

Dragić, who posted the first photo of the group from the first night but hadn’t thought of a nickname, also approved.

“I don’t know if a lot of people understand that,” Dragić said. “But we know what it means.”

Other Balkan Boys in the NBA include Bojan Bogdanović (Croatia), Bogdan Bogdanović (Serbia), Dario Šarić (Croatia), Nemanja Bjelica (Serbia), Dzanan Musa (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Luka Šamanić (Croatia), Alen Smailagić (Serbia), Marko Gudurić (Serbia) and Ante Žižić (Croatia). Bojan Bogdanović, Bogdan Bogdanović, Šarić and Bjelica are especially close with the Orlando group.

Up until that point, the Balkan Boys hadn’t been able to hang out much at Disney World, and certainly not in this large of a group. Each player was on a different schedule with the every-other-day nature of the bubble’s seeding games and playoffs.

Zubac has endured a unique bubble experience in the playoffs, facing Dončić and Marjanović in the first round and Jokić in the conference semifinals. The Los Angeles Clippers and Dallas Mavericks were still in the middle of their series when the NBA’s Orlando stoppage happened. The trio avoided trash-talking or discussing the matchup altogether at their gatherings.

“It was normal,” Zubac said. “We didn’t talk about it. … We just kept it like nothing was happening.”

During the season, the group doesn’t communicate much with the grind of the 82-game schedule and playoffs — and almost certainly never in a group of more than a few of them.

But whenever one is in the other’s city, they will reach out to go to dinner or hang out at each other’s places.

“We speak more like only when I go play a team that has one of those guys on,” Zubac said. “I hit them up, ‘Let’s go for dinner,’ or I go to their place and we’ll play video games or stuff like that.”