Of course it’s all about the money. Here, this week, in this place, that’s impossible to forget.

It’s not just that Floyd Mayweather Jr., and company have made cash the core value of the character they have so successfully created, hero to some, villain to many others. The Money Team is imprinted on all of his licensed gear, and if you want to find stories about Mayweather making outrageous bets or buying another insanely expensive car or doing the 21st Century equivalent of lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills, you don’t have to look very hard.

There is the other stuff as well. The fact that this fight is happening now because Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao have seen their pay-per-view numbers fall precipitously in recent years, meaning that only this mega-bout could provide the kind of return to which they had grown accustomed, and which they might very much appreciate at the tail-end of their careers. (But it wouldn’t have happened if Mayweather hadn’t been able to force Pacquiao into taking considerably less than half of the estimated $300-million proceeds.)

The chaotic nature of this promotion — the shortened time-line, the last-minute signing of a site contract and the very late release of tickets to the public — all of that had to do with jostling between the two fighters’ representatives over every last nickel. Now, on the “secondary market”, ringside seats are said to be selling for unprecedented, astronomical sums.

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Yep, that’s what makes the world go ‘round, and keeps the lights on the Strip from going dark.

But on Mayweather’s side of the equation, there is also something more on the table than how many more zeroes he will have added to his bank account come Sunday morning.

Boxing is an old-fashioned, history-worshipping sport, fundamentally unchanged since the Marquess of Queensberry’s code of conduct was adopted in the late 19th Century. Comparisons across great expanses of time are tricky — but less problematic in boxing than in hockey or baseball or football, where far more of the fundamentals have changed.

By any measure, Manny Pacquiao is an overachiever. In moving all the way up from flyweight, where he began his career 20 years ago, he has succeeded — and occasionally failed — against bigger, stronger opponents. The image of him being knocked cold by Juan Manuel Marquez is still fresh in memory. So if Pacquiao loses on Saturday night, which is the result most of the boxing world expects, no one will think less of him, and it will not in any way diminish his accomplishments.

With Mayweather, it’s different, and not just because his record stands at 47-0, not just because the other t-shirt slogan he’s fond of is TBE — The Best Ever. What he is shooting for this weekend is the chance to be included in a conversation that really includes only one other boxer — Ray Robinson.

Cue the chorus of “Heresy!” from the fight crowd, who have made Sugar Ray’s pre-eminence an article of faith. There have been other boxers who have been masters of the art, and one champion, Rocky Marciano, who retired with an unblemished 49-0 record. But it always comes back to Robinson, and especially to the first phase of his career, when as welterweight, he was all but untouchable. The film record is better later on, when he had all of those memorable wars at middleweight and lost in a challenge for the light heavyweight title, and the final section of his resume most conveniently forget, as Robinson in his dotage barnstormed around fighting in small places for small paydays and losing on a semi-regular basis. (By the end, he had 19 losses and six draws on his record, albeit in an unbelievable 200 fights.)

The last modern fighter who aspired to such historic greatness was Roy Jones Jr., but he crumbled when his reflexes gave out, which made him especially vulnerable because of his unorthodox style. Before that, it was Ray Leonard, whose stock went way up after he bounced back from his first loss to Roberto Duran (and who, like Robinson, is forgiven for the uncomfortable final stages of his career.) Looking back through the mists of time you can talk about Willie Pep and Henry Armstrong and of course Muhammad Ali, though so much of what is revered about him has nothing to do with boxing.

Mayweather has been accused of carefully choosing his opponents — though it’s hard to blame him for that, and it’s hard to come up with the name of someone he should have fought but didn’t. He has been criticized for his safety-first style, though a lot of guys on the all-time list also did a pretty good job of not being hit. There is no arguing, though, that he has been unbeaten and largely untroubled during his career, that he has moved up in weight and succeeded, that he has achieved a kind of technical perfection that brings out the Robinson comparisons, and that should he win Saturday, win once more in what he says will be his final bout in September, and then refrains from an embarrassing comeback and leaves it to the historians, he will have secured his place in the pantheon, even if there will still be a debate about where he belongs on the all-time list.

But if he loses to Pacquiao on Saturday night, all of that goes out the window.

And what will be gone, no amount of money can buy back.