Actress, producer and philanthropist Eva Longoria now dons her sports cap to bring the inspirational story of San Antonio’s “Little Mariachi” and the NBA Finals drama of two years ago to ESPN this week.

Many already are familiar with Sebastien De La Cruz and the hateful backlash and subsequent outcry — by everyone from Whoopi Goldberg to President Obama — that surrounded the singer’s national anthem performances in June 2013 in the AT&T Center.

However, Longoria said she was determined to revive the story “on a much bigger stage, in a more complete way.”

“It was a big deal when it happened,” she said at an ESPN Films’ press session. “But if you weren’t watching basketball, if you weren’t Hispanic, if you didn’t really follow it all the way along, you won’t get the complete narrative.”

She worked to rectify that. The result: “¡Go Sebastien Go!”, a 16-minute film Longoria directed and executive produced. It will premiere on cable TV sports outlet ESPN during the 5 p.m. Friday broadcast of “SportsCenter.”

Helping tell the story are Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich; Sebastien’s family; and two Express-News reporters who covered it, René A. Guzman and Mike Monroe.

“I’m excited to see it,” Sebastien, now 13 and a seventh-grader at Kitty Hawk Middle School, said in a phone chat. “Mainly because it comes from Eva, my madrina. She has taken me under her wing kind of like a godson.”

“¡Go Sebastien Go!” kicks off Longoria’s “Versus,” a series of documentary shorts for ESPN Films that will air this spring and summer.

“I thought, 'What about when athletes or people overcome a moral obstacle or something questioning values in their own system?’ And how do they overcome it and what happened?” Longoria said.

Sebastien was a last-minute replacement for Darius Rucker when the former Hootie & the Blowfish singer couldn’t make it to San Antonio to perform the national anthem before game three of the 2013 Spurs-Heat finals.

A diehard Spurs fan whose national claim to fame at the time was as a semifinalist on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” he was thrilled to oblige. He put on the traditional mariachi suit he always wears to public performances and delivered the anthem passionately on ABC-TV.

He had no inkling of the ugliness that would follow.

“He’s fifth-generation American,” Longoria said, “yet the Twitter backlash was, 'Why is that Mexican singing our national anthem? Go home.’

“It caused this insane disruption in the sports world,” she added. “It wasn’t sports related, but yet there was this rallying of the Spurs, of their management, of the team, so much so that they brought him back the next game as a big, you know, 'Take that, you ignorant people!’”

Coach Popovich may seem gruff and abrupt during post-game interviews, but in the film, he’s all heart and humanity.

“My first reaction was anger, then I felt badly for him,” Popovich says. “This 11-year-old, really, are you serious?

“You just hope that people have common sense that some things are out of bounds; children are out of bounds.”

Sebastien’s parents initially were upset by the bigoted tweets but soon were heartened to see their son take them in stride.

“When it comes to your children, you want to put your wings on and protect them,” dad Juan De La Cruz, a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, says in the film. “But I noticed he was being really strong about it. That’s one thing I learned about him.”

Popovich also was impressed.

“The best part of the whole thing was Sebastien’s reaction,” he says. “Total class, ignore the ignorance. Move on.”

Though remarkable in some ways, Sebastien also is portrayed as a regular kid.

“He’s normal,” mom Stacy says. “He’ll go and of course make a mess in his room, terrorize it, and OK, Mom, I’ve cleaned up and done the whole shoving under the bed kind of thing.”

The contrast between the boy “who plays soccer and video games,” Longoria said, and the Sebastien who “was thrown into the center of this debate about immigration, and what it means to be a minority, and what it means to be Mexican American,” was one of the things she hoped to get across. “Sebastien was so eloquent in how he handled the situation, for being a little boy at the time, to have been targeted by all of this racism.”

As Popovich says in the film, Sebastien “became part of the family at that point, somebody we weren’t going to let anybody else harm.”

Sebastien continues to feel like a Spurs family member, he said.

He was asked back last year to sing before game two of the Spurs-Heat finals, and just last week he belted the anthem at a Spurs-Clippers playoff game. His star is rising in other ways, too. He has been singing with Chicago’s Lyric Opera and is especially excited about the upcoming release of his first CD, “Tu y Yo.”

“¡Go Sebastien Go!” was described as a huge success at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival last month.

“People got emotional,” said producer Gibby Cevallos, who, along with his brother Mickey, shot the film and helped pull it together. “Many were in tears.”

Jeanne Jakle’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays in mySA, and she blogs at Jakle’s Jacuzzi on mySA.com. Email her at jakle@express-news.net.