This was one of the last times Joe DiMaggio would visit Yankee Stadium, one more Old-Timers’ Day in the old Stadium to which he used to own the deed. It was a broiling hot day, and all around him middle-aged ex-ballplayers stuffed into baseball uniforms were sweating and panting and dreaming of cold beers.

DiMaggio, as always, looked as if he’d stepped directly out of the pages of GQ, his suit pristine, his necktie perfectly knotted, not a drop of perspiration anywhere. He was asked if these appearances at the Stadium — where he was always introduced last, always as “the greatest living ballplayer” — had begun to mean more to him as the years passed.

DiMaggio smiled.

“I’ve heard more cheers directed my way than one man deserves to hear in one lifetime,” he said. “It’s lovely, but it’s besides the point. It’s the people who seem to love to see me show up, come back here, say hello. This is for them, much more than it’s for me.”

You suspect that’s precisely how Derek Jeter will feel Friday night, when at last the Yankees welcome him back home to The Bronx to offer proper ceremony for his induction in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Jeter will be honored before the Yankees’ game with the Rays, a year and a day after he was welcomed into Cooperstown’s eternal embrace.

It feels like there has always been something a little off about Jeter’s entire Hall of Fame journey. His induction was postponed a year because of the pandemic. The ceremony itself was more muted than usual, held six weeks later than usual. There was the one deep thinker who left Jeter off his ballot, preventing him from joining Mariano Rivera as unanimous choices. Plus, until recently, Jeter had another job, running the Marlins.

And other things kept Jeter away, too. In 2018 he missed the 20th-anniversary celebration of the 125-win 1998 juggernaut because he was committed to celebrating his daughter’s birthday. He did return a year earlier when his No. 2 was formally retired, but that was five years ago and it feels like longer than that somehow.

So Friday will be loud at the Stadium.

Friday will be about saying thank you to a homegrown phenomenon who took the city by storm as a 21-year-old and never let its lapels out of his grip until he was 40, who amassed 3,465 hits and hit .310 for his career and won five championship rings, and across every second of those 19 years he never ceased to be amazed that it had all happened for him in Yankees pinstripes.

Friday will be about the baseball life that helped define a generation in New York in the same way DiMaggio’s did, in the same way Babe Ruth’s did, in the same way Mickey Mantle’s did. Yogi Berra — who heard his fair share of Yankee Stadium thunder through the years — once quipped of Jeter: “If he wasn’t a Yankee, I’d have to hate him, so I’m glad he was a Yankee.”

Friday, 50,000 voices will echo Yogi’s sentiments. They will allow their voices to provide the message, and it will flow onto the field, it will spill over the top of the stadium and out onto the 4 train platform, out around the Bronx County Courthouse, out across the street to where the old Stadium once stood.

That part of Friday will be for Jeter.

But Friday will also be for a generation of kids who all grew up copying Jeter’s batting stance and all the quirks that went along with it, most of those kids well into their 30s by now, and their 40s, many of them still requesting 2 for their softball-league numbers, for old-time’s sake. Most of them telling tales about Jeter to their kids the way their own fathers spoke of Mantle, the way their grandfathers spoke of DiMaggio.

Those fans know how lucky they were to see the entirety of Jeter’s career, and Jeter has always taken great care to let Yankees fans know he heard them. On the day he was traded from the Mets to the Reds, Tom Seaver said of his fans: “I’ve given them a great many thrills, and they’ve been equally returned.” It’s the same equation with Jeter and Yankees fans.

“Yankees fans,” Jeter said the night of his number retirement, “are the greatest fans in the history of sports.”

Nothing he hears Friday night will alter that. It will be a warm, welcome homecoming. For Jeter, sure. And for everyone else in the house, too.