New York ? The Red Sox return to the Bronx tonight, and call me crazy, but I don’t sense that Yankees fans will respect David Ortiz’s “Give me time to figure out how I tested positive back in ’03” plea.

“Gary Sheffield and Carl Pavano have gotten it the worst this year,” Lisa Swan said Wednesday. “It’s going to eclipse that. Yankees fans, including myself are gleeful.”

Swan, a Yankees fan, writes for The Faster Times as well as her own blog, Subway Squawkers, with Jon Lewin. She clued me into the rancor that has developed between Yankees Universe and Red Sox Nation the last few years concerning illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

“Red Sox fans started it, by saying that (Jason) Giambi hit two homers (in Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series) using steroids,” Swan said. “They were the gritty, gutty Red Sox, blue-collar and all that.

“To finally have Ortiz as guilty is pretty cool. The Red Sox fans have lost the moral high ground.”

Here’s what I’m hoping: That now that Boston has been sufficiently nabbed — if not as conclusively as Yankees fans would like to believe — we can lose this illegal performance-enhancing drugs debate altogether.

I mean, really. Doesn’t this rivalry have enough going for it without finger-wagging moralism?

Ortiz’s positive 2003 test doesn’t mean for certain that he was up to no good when he turned into Superman in the ’04 ALCS. Giambi’s forced confessions have never specifically mentioned what he was or wasn’t using in October of ’03. We don’t know all of the details for certain on Alex Rodriguez, or Manny Ramirez, or Andy Pettitte.

But the greater point is, to channel Bill Murray from “Meatballs,” it just doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter who was doing what and when. It doesn’t matter what the profoundly conflicted George Mitchell discovered en route to his “report,” or what some lawbreaking attorney is leaking.

The Yankees won four World Series titles, and six AL pennants, within an eight-year span, 1996 through 2003. They did so abiding by the rules — or lack thereof — of the era.

The Red Sox came back to beat the Yankees in the ’04 ALCS, and then defeated the Cardinals in the World Series. They actually took drug tests that season, although a player would’ve had to have failed twice to have been publicly outed.

It was, as Rodriguez put it, a “loosey-goosey” time. Each era has its “taint,” if you will.

We’re dealing with it now. The testing program, while far from perfect, is in place. Clubs, including the Yankees and Red Sox, are trying not to rely heavily on older players, knowing how the aging curve has evolved.

No one comes out clean from what went down. Not the Yankees, nor the Red Sox, nor the other 28 teams. Nor the Players Association, nor Bud Selig, nor the media. Maybe not even the fans.

So to go back six years, and to start getting all accusatory, that doesn’t make much sense to this space.

Go ahead, Yankees fans, take Thursday night to pepper Big Papi. Take the whole weekend, if you’d like. Then move on.

As Swan said, “I think it’s going to be at the point where there are so many guys who have done it,” that no team or its fans can claim moral superiority.

I think Swan is right. It’s more fun, anyway, to battle over superiority on the field. The steroids stuff is way too messy for the world’s toy department.