Man, it’s been a long time since we had a night like this one, a night when Yankee Stadium will be as big a star as the players who will play upon its turf, as essential a character in the whole drama as the teams who will square off at 7:07 Friday night, Game 1 of the American League Division Series, Yankees versus Twins.

We live in a time of so many knock-around teams, so many knock-around seasons littering our sporting calendar. We have recently lived, most egregiously, in the shadow of that little town a couple hours northeast of here. This is not who we are. This is never who we have been. We are about big moments and deafening arenas. We are about swagger, whether earned or perceived.

You may not like that about us, and maybe you shouldn’t, but that’s always been an essential part of who we are. We are Fun City. We are Madison Avenue. We are a hell of a town. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.

Mostly, lately, we have been down. We have had a litany of dreadful football seasons, augmented by a string of deplorable basketball seasons. The Mets gave us five games of a World Series four years ago but that was so unexpected it felt like a dream even as it was happening. The Stanley Cup tours North America and never seems to land here, not lately.

The Yankees? Hell. Even the Yankees have been different. It had been seven years since they finished in first place. It’s been 10 since the last World Series, and if nobody is willing to sponsor a telethon for that drought, it’s still a notable dry spell. The Yankees win a lot of games every year, but it’s been a while since they felt like … well, the Yankees.

Only this time, they do.

This year, they feel like the Yankees.

This October season, with another hundred-win team ready to fight them for the right to play in the ALCS, the Yankees have an old familiar aura about them, born in the blueprints of long-term planning, tempered by injury, disciplined by a hard and difficult season in which it seemed like they were riding the precipice of disaster all year long and still managed to thrive.

“Sometimes, you look at what we’ve been through,” Aaron Judge said this week, “and it almost seems unbelievable that we are where we are.”

Where they are is back where they belong, among the sport’s mammoths, right there with the Astros and the Dodgers, teams who treat the regular season as 162-game appetizers. The Yankees won 103 games this year, and they did it differently than most classic Yankees teams, teams fortified and fueled by superstars and celestial behemoths. This time, it was bit players named Urshela and Ford and Tauchman who helped carry the load. It was an imported free-agent addition named DJ LeMahieu who provided so much of the spark.

It was an old hand like Brett Gardner whose occasional rages inspired his manager, Aaron Boone, to label this team “savages,” a name that stuck and an image that lasts into October, and a slogan around which all Yankees fans can rally.

Savages? Sure. Babe Ruth was the original savage. All the essential one-name-only supernovas who have authored the team record books — Mickey and Whitey and Bernie, Joltin’ Joe and the Iron Horse and Yogi, Reggie and Thurman and Mariano and The Captain — they were all savages, too, you bet, especially now. Especially as the days grow colder, and shorter.

Especially in October.

“It’s nuts,” said Giancarlo Stanton, who has thus far experienced only three postseason games at Yankee Stadium but learned, immediately, what it means to play those games in this stadium. “The fans really bring the heat and make it tough on the opposing team. It’s great. I’m looking forward to just as loud, just as rowdy as last year. It’s going to be fun.”

For the Yankees, it should be. For the fans? For sure.

For the city? It’s been so long since we heard the Garden shoving the volume up to 11, since we had any reason to make MetLife Stadium rattle and hum. Since Citi Field rocked as Shea used to, so violently you kept waiting for the upper deck to collide with the mezzanine. Who knows how loud Barclays Center can get?

Now, again, at last, we get Yankee Stadium in full throat, not slumming for a wild-card game, not serving as an unfriendly stage for an unwanted Red Sox champagne shower. At 7:07 p.m., the biggest of all baseball basilicas will be loud, and brash, and angry and exhilarating. Man. It’s been a long time.