The Boston Red Sox will play the Yankees in the Bronx not only tonight, but for many years to come. Patrons will take the D train to these games. The louts among them will ring bells, wear obscene T-shirts, and wing batteries at Sox outfielders. The games will count. When the two teams play a year from now, they’ll probably do so with a playoff spot on the line. When they play 50 years from now, the stands will be filled with old people extolling the virtues of Derek Jeter and David Ortiz.

All of this is to say that while the series starting tonight will, barring a catastrophic collapse by the Tampa Bay Rays, mark the last time the Red Sox play in the current iteration of Yankee Stadium, this doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, matter much at all. Buildings are knocked down, new ones replace them, and New York remains a city rather than a museum. Everyone will have their favorite memories of Sox-Yanks tilts at the old yard — mine are of Pedro Martinez’s 1999 one-hitter, the most brilliantly pitched game I’ll ever see — but soon enough they’ll have favorite memories of the new one. Memories aren’t why this series matters. The standings are.

Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, and, marvelously, Sir Sidney Ponson will hold their team’s playoff hopes in their hands over the next few days. The games played tonight through Thursday will represent, potentially, a six-game swing. If Boston wins all three, they’ll be eight up in the wild card standings, leaving the Yankees to play a meaningless September for the first time since 1992. Conversely, a Yankees sweep would leave them just two behind Boston. Games with these kinds of stakes are why radios and late August were invented.

It’s a golden chance for Joe Girardi’s men. However much injuries have affected their chances, Boston has been hit just as badly, and they’re getting some of the worst of it right now. Tim Wakefield, who’s spent most of the month on the disabled list, will start tonight’s game in place of Josh Beckett, who is dealing with a possibly serious elbow problem. MVP candidate J.D. Drew has missed a week’s worth of games with a herniated disc in his back. Ortiz hasn’t been Ortiz all year, and has slugged .421 this month, seemingly still plagued by the wonky wrist that put him on the disabled list earlier this summer. And while left fielder Jason Bay is a terrific player, he doesn’t strike terror in the hearts of pitchers, and fans like the man he’s replaced.

Still, however good the chance, the Yankees may not quite be poised to take perfect advantage of the moment. You do have to like Pettitte at home over Wakefield fresh off an injury — or, rather, you don’t, but you should — and in an epically lame showdown, Boston waiver pickup Paul Byrd should have a bit of an edge over the titled Ponson, fresh off a sound thrashing at the hands of Toronto. Should things work out on the field as they do on paper (and of course they won’t), that would leave the swing game, and with it a decent bit of the Yankees’ chance to make a late charge toward serious contention with Mussina and Jon Lester in Thursday’s afternoon game.

Say what you will about the hype, but that’s an amazing pair of leads for the last game between the two old rivals in the old, dying ballpark. Even giving Beckett and Joba Chamberlain their health, there might not be any two pitchers better suited for the job.

Lester, for his part, represents everything good about the Red Sox as an organization. Simply as a pitcher, the reigning American League pitcher of the month is remarkably impressive, reminiscent of Pettitte in his younger days both in his style and his knack for the big moment. At 24, he has already pitched a no-hitter at Fenway, shut out the Yankees in his first game in the Bronx earlier this summer, and closed out the World Series last year with a win in his first postseason start. He’s one of the gems of the “$100 million development machine” that general manager Theo Epstein boasted he’d build five years ago, a system that’s produced players such as Dustin Pedroia, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Jonathan Papelbon and secured the team’s future. That he’s done all this after being diagnosed with cancer two years ago this month is, on some level, unbelievable.

Opposing Lester will be Mussina, a player at the far opposite end of his career, and one who in his way represents the best of his team as much as Lester does his. At 39, Mussina was a deserving Hall of Famer before this season even began, but he’s really only being recognized as such now, as he comes near winning 20 games in a season for the first time.

It can be easy to write down the Yankees as old, mercenary, and merely rich, but over the years they’ve been beyond deft in securing truly excellent veterans, the kind of players who age slowly and well, and Mussina represents that approach at its best. Along with Pettitte, one of the last remnants of the old dynasty, and Ponson, the epitome of the completely random pickups the team inexplicably fields each summer, one last shot at October will be on him. The story of this rivalry isn’t close to over, but whatever the outcome, its last chapter at the Yankees’ current address should be a good one.

tmarchman@nysun.com