BY THE time the endless receiving line of gas-bag politicians had finished tearing up their rotator cuffs patting themselves on the back, it was almost easy to forget why everyone had gathered inside the Stadium Club in the first place.

By the time this endless procession had mercifully completed their interminable, tearful tales of all that Yankee Stadium meant to them – to their fathers, to their daughters, to their nieces and nephews and mailmen and barbers and accountants – the real star of the afternoon announcement had been all but overlooked.

And Progress was peeved.

“I’m not talking,” Progress told The Post, as he slipped out of the Stadium, sprinted down 161st Street and disappeared into the thick crowds of fans eager to watch the Yankees play the Pirates.

Progress always takes a beating during times such as these, when elected officials grow weepy and loquacious, when sentimentalists begin to murmur about good old days that weren’t always so good. For years, there had been too many voices obscuring the truths about the place where the Yankees conduct their business 81 times a year:

Yankee Stadium is 82 years old.

Yankee Stadium was once a state-of-the-art facility.

Calvin Coolidge was the president when it was last a state-of-the-art facility.

Of course the Yankees need a new place to play, and that reality has little to do with the modern amenities – wider concourses, spacier luxury boxes, brilliant sight lines – that come ready-made in any new sporting palace. It also has little to do with the fact that four days ago the Mets’ dream of a new stadium in Queens began to take shape.

Stadiums are not built to last forever, not even this one, which was built in less than eight months eight decades ago – which contains more history and more memories and more ghosts within its walls than any coliseum in American history.

“This is not the end of a legacy,” Yankees president Randy Levine said, “but the continuation of one.”

It tells you something about the maudlin ceremony surrounding the Yankees’ announcement yesterday that Levin was actually a voice of restraint on the whole matter yesterday.

Mayor Bloomberg actually said that people in other nations look at the Yankees and think: “They are America.” Governor Pataki sounded like he was making a pitch for a Lifetime movie when he recalled scouring the Yankees schedule every spring, trying to determine which day he and his father would make their annual pilgrimage to the Stadium.

The other politicos who offered comments . . . well, let’s just say one of them (we’ll keep his name out of it, to spare him further humiliation) actually talked about how watching the Yankees lose the 2001 World Series was “the most heartbreaking moment of my life,” an interesting observation by a man elected by people whose city had been attacked less than two months earlier.

At the end of the day, all we are talking about is a baseball stadium, after all. The weepy romantics can talk all they want about how Ruth played here, and Gehrig played here, and Whitey and Billy and Joe D and the Mick. But the fact is that stadium ceased to exist in 1973. If anything, the new stadium will be far more of an homage to that stadium – or “cathedral,” as every insisted on calling it yesterday – than the one in which the Yankees currently play.

Better, in the tradition of Col. Jacob Ruppert, who built the place originally, the Yankees themselves will pony up all $800 million of the construction costs.

“That’s a lot of money,” George Steinbrenner observed, without a hint of irony – which is a grand relief after the shell game that shadowed so much of the Jets’ West Side saga.

It’s called Progress, and it’s a smart thing for the city and a saving grace for the Yankees. Neither a sentimentalist’s tears nor a politician’s bluster could obscure that. For once, it seems, we have a sports-facility plan that makes sense. For everyone.

Progress most of all.