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Nobody knew back on September 28, 1976, that five decades of uninterrupted boxing majesty would suddenly stop and go on hiatus for three decades. What everybody did know on that night was that there was a perfect union of one of the greatest venues in the world and … well, The Greatest.

The last time Yankee Stadium hosted a world championship bout, it involved Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton. For those who were there that night — or who survived that night, which is another story in itself — and those who watched from elsewhere, the fight was unforgettable.

The end of that era in boxing history was unanticipated — who would have guessed that the next big fight in The Bronx would be this Saturday, nearly 34 years later, with Miguel Cotto facing Yuri Foreman for the latter’s WBA junior middleweight (154 pounds) crown, in a building next to the now-demolished original? But it was appropriate.

“I don’t know what impact it had on Ken Norton,” said Bob Arum, the promoter for that fight and for Saturday’s. “But I know, because I was closest to Ali, that he gauged immediately the magnitude of fighting in Yankee Stadium.”

Norton did know about the historic weight of the building — even though it was the recently renovated version of the original — and even more about the pull of Ali in New York City, then and now a boxing mecca. “The New York crowd loved Ali but respected me,” Norton wrote in his 2009 autobiography, Believe.

New York, and Yankee Stadium, had seen too many legends fight to not grasp the significance of Ali’s only trip. The House That Ruth Built hosted its first fight card, led by former heavyweight champion Jess Willard, in May 1923, a month after Babe Ruth christened it with a home run.

The first championship fight came in July of that year, when Benny Leonard defended his lightweight title by decision over Lew Tendler. The site had also been home to the first televised sporting event, a Max Baer win over Lou Nova in 1939.

Ali-Norton was the 30th and last title fight in Yankee Stadium — and 17 years had passed since the previous one, Ingemar Johansson’s shocking defeat of Floyd Patterson in 1959.

Much as Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, was the impetus behind boxing returning to large, open-air stadiums earlier this year when Manny Pacquaio and Joshua Clottey (Pacman next!) fought in his new stadium, back in 1976 the big push to put the Ali-Norton fight in Yankee Stadium came from Yankees owner George Steinbrenner — still a year away from his first World Series win, but already immortalized on the back pages of the tabloids as “The Boss.”

And, as is the case with the Yankees officials spearheading the renaissance of boxing at the new stadium, the history of greatness at the old venue is what drove Steinbrenner to end the drought.

In the 53 years between Benny Leonard and Muhammad Ali, a lengthy parade of champions had entered the ring situated at second base in the ballpark. Jack Dempsey knocked out Jack Sharkey in a title defense in 1927 as a warmup for his famous “long count” bout with Gene Tunney later that year.

A year after that, Tunney won his final fight there and retired as heavyweight champ. Rocky Marciano beat Ezzard Charles there twice in 1954, and ran his career record to 49-0 in his final fight against Archie Moore in 1955. The first of the three classic Rocky Graziano-Tony Zale fights were there in 1946.

Sugar Ray Robinson, a New York native, only lost 19 times in 198 career bouts, but two of them were in the Stadium — once before his first retirement in 1952, when he was leading Joey Maxim after 13 rounds in a quest for the light-heavyweight crown, but was done in by heat exhaustion on a 104-degree night and couldn’t answer the bell for the 14th round.

And Joe Louis fought there 11 times, eight with his heavyweight title on the line. One of those bouts is still cherished by fight historians and fans who either witnessed or listened to it: light-heavyweight Billy Conn’s near-upset of Louis in 1946. However, the most memorable of Louis’ appearances is noted as much in American history books as in the fight records: his knockout of Max Schmeling — the German heavyweight who had beaten Louis previously and had become a favorite of Adolf Hitler — on June 22, 1938.

“Probably the most significant event — forget boxing, the most significant sporting event in history — was held in Yankee Stadium,” Arum said. “It was a major, major worldwide event, and Louis beating Schmeling had an effect on how the world saw Germany and the Nazi race. People who weren’t even born then know about the importance of that fight.”

That would include Ali, who, hardly coincidentally, had Louis in his camp as he trained for the Norton fight; never one to take the sport’s history lightly, Ali had paid homage to the likes of Louis and Jack Johnson throughout his career. Ali was still an unqualified legend, but the tarnish had come off lately — he was 34, had been knocked down by Joe Frazier in “The Fight of the Century” five years earlier, and most significantly, had lost to Norton himself in 1973, when Norton had broken Ali’s jaw.

This was their third bout, after Ali had won the rematch by a close decision (and after Ali had outlasted Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila” in 1975). As observers watched the intensity both of Ali’s training at his site in the Catskills and of his needling of Norton — a “young” 31 who had started boxing late in a stint in the Marines — many were convinced that Ali was taking this bout as seriously as any he’d ever fought.

The city was as engaged in the fight as Ali and Norton were. The two hyped the fight at City Hall, with then-Mayor Abe Beame photographed separating them as they snarled and cocked fists at each other. The Madison Square Garden Corporation, which helped promote the bout, said that it had printed and distributed more posters advertising the fight than for any other before, and officials also bragged to the New York Times that more were being stolen than any other time they could recall.

Mike Burke, the president of the Garden, created travel packages for fans from around the country and overseas to fly in. The celebrity and society factor, while not as high as the first Ali-Frazier bout in 1971, was still higher than for most of Ali’s domestic bouts. A trio of New York Jets players drove up to the training site after practice one day to meet Ali; according to the Times, Ali recognized them as “Joe Namath’s team … Joe Namath is OK. He’s just like me. He’s pretty.”

In those pre-pay-per-view days, interest in ticket sales and closed-circuit viewings were high enough that Ali was guaranteed a record $6 million, with Norton guaranteed $1 million, and a record live gate of $3.5 million was eagerly anticipated.

Ali joined in the hype with typical fervor. He encouraged onlookers at his sparring sessions to chant along with him, “Norton must fall!” — his attempt at reprising the “Ali, bomaye” chant from the George Foreman bout in Zaire two years earlier. He arrived at the pre-fight physical with an entourage that carried blown-up photos of a half-naked Norton from his movie debut a year ago, the plantation potboiler “Mandingo.” Ali himself shouted, “We don’t need no X-rated champion.”

Norton took it all in good humor, congratulating Ali privately for driving ticket sales; he naturally was a big admirer, and even visited Ali in the hospital, where he needed attention after an ill-advised exhibition against Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki. But he also went into the fight supremely confident, knowing that not only had he gotten to Ali once, but could have won the rematch as well.

Then came fight night. The bout itself sticks in the minds of Ali followers because they’ll never know for sure if their man actually won: going into the 15th and final round, the two judges had it even, and referee Arthur Mercante Sr. had Ali up 7-6-1. When the final bell rang, seemingly everybody in Yankee Stadium thought Norton had won — but those three men scored the round for Ali, giving him the decision. Famously, Norton wept as he left the ring, the photo of him unsuccessfully fighting back the tears remaining one of the indelible images of the fight.

“It was the only time that I’ve cried since I’ve been over about eight years old,” Norton said in the 2002 book Facing Ali (which was made into a documentary last year). “It was just crushing to me. I knew I had won that fight. He knew I had won that fight. The judges knew I had won that fight. But yet, they gave it to him.”

What Norton told reporters that night after the fight was even more concise: “The only way you could win over Muhammad Ali was to stop him with a Magnum.”

Within a few days of the fight, U.S. Rep. B.F. Sisk of central California (Norton lived and trained in southern California) demanded federal oversight for boxing, and — proving that political grandstanding is not a recent invention — denounced the “atrocious decision” in Ali’s favor on the House floor.

Both sides agreed that the difference in the final round came before the bell rang: Ali’s corner told him that he needed to win that round to win the fight, while Norton’s told him that he was comfortably ahead and only needed to stay on his feet.

Yet all of that controversy in the ring paled in comparison to what ensued that night outside of it. All of the pre-fight promotion and preparation was undone by, of all things, a contract dispute between the city and the police union.

Extra officers were assigned to work Yankee Stadium and the surrounding Bronx neighborhood the night of the fight, and a court order was issued to prevent off-duty police from showing up and starting any trouble; the on-duty officers were ordered to arrest their own if they did anything to disrupt the scene.

It was all ignored. Hundreds of protesting off-duty police showed up, blocking traffic and entrances to the stadium. It delayed the start of the fight, partly because Ali and his party were among the many whose arrival at the stadium was delayed by the rowdy crowd . It also encouraged locals — in what was then one of the most notoriously crime-ridden neighborhoods in the country, much less the city — to harass fans entering the fight, and to sneak in for free anyplace they could.

To put it mildly, the lawlessness on the scene held down the paid attendance. “People got off the trains to go to the fight, saw the mayhem and chaos, got back on the trains and never went in,” Arum recalled with dismay.

Inside there were numerous reports of spectators getting mugged at ringside — and of even the security assigned to the crowd hiding their own valuables. Wrote legendary sportswriter Red Smith two days later, “For the pickpockets, it was like Christmas morning, and Ken Norton was by no means the only mark robbed.”

Instead of an expected crowd of at least 40,000, the announced attendance was 30,298, taking a bite out of the proposed revenues. As much as Arum is effervescent about the possibilities of the return of the sport to the new Yankee Stadium this weekend, he is just as bitter about how that previous era ended. “We’d done a huge advance sale, and we expected a huge walk-up,” Arum said.

On the bright side, he said, “New York was different then … What happened in New York City then couldn’t happen today.” He is convinced that the legacy of boxing in Yankee Stadium — which was upheld that night in 1976 by Ali and Norton — will re-emerge, rather than the memory of crime and corruption.

“More and more you will see events in the large stadiums,” Arum said, “and it figures that Yankee Stadium, the premier venue for those giants over the years, would rise to the top.”