BOSTON — On the final day of the 2002 season, Jason Varitek stepped to the plate in the bottom of the seventh inning with the Red Sox up by a run on the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

He crushed a solo homer to left, the ball landing in the net above the Green Monster.

It would be the last home run ever hit into the netting.

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“That’s the only offensive stat I remember,” said Varitek, now the team’s game-planning coordinator.

Over that 2002-03 winter, the Red Sox installed seats above the Green Monster in an effort to revitalize the ballpark after bids to move the team to a newer space.

Twenty years later, those Green Monster seats still serve up some of the best views in baseball.

“Whenever I have friends that come in, if those seats are available, I’ll make sure they watch the game up there and they say the experience is unique,” said manager Alex Cora, who played his first game at Fenway as a member of the Dodgers in 2004 and watched his first home run into the seats off the bat of Olmedo Saenz.

“It was the coolest thing ever, like ‘wow, this is different,’” Cora said.

On Thursday, NESN commemorated the 20-year anniversary of the seats by doing the broadcast from the front row of the Monster, in the far left-center corner just above the 379-foot marker.

The planning for the game atop the Monster started months ago with NESN senior coordinating director Mike Narracci and Red Sox senior vice president of marketing and broadcasting Colin Birch spearheading the endeavor. Four headsets, three monitors and an extra camera were set up in the section with NESN play-by-play man Dave O’Brien joined by analysts Tim Wakefield and Kevin Youkilis. NESN had their booth above home plate also ready to go, in case of bad weather at the last minute. That was no issue, though, with an 85-degree first-pitch temperature.

“We picked the warmest day of the year,” O’Brien said.

The Red Sox debuted the Monster seats on April 12, 2003 with 269 fixed seats and 150 additional standing-room-only spots.

Like Varitek, Wakefield was among the players who were on the Red Sox before and after the seats were atop the wall. Wakefield remembered returning in the 2003 season to see the new-look ballpark feature looking like it’d been there all along.

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“I just thought it was cool, and how do they make it look like it’s been there forever?” the 19-year major-league veteran said.

Varitek, Wakefield and Youkilis all recalled one feature they wished still remained: the Coke bottles that were affixed to the light towers above the wall.

“The only thing they ever messed up was not keeping those Coke bottles,” Youkilis said. “I hit them in the ‘07 ALCS and it was the coolest thing ever.”

There have been hundreds of homers over the years hit into the Monster seats, but on the second day after the seats opened to fans in April 2003, it was Nomar Garciaparra who christened the seats with their first homer, a solo shot off the Orioles’ Rodrigo Lopez.

Wakefield and Youkilis reminisced about other memorable Monster-seat homers, including one off the bat of Wily Mo Pena in 2006 that was hit so hard it ricocheted back onto the field all the way to shortstop. Those were pre-Statcast era days, but surely Pena’s scorching liner could have ranked among the hardest exit velocities hit at the park.

“It was a line drive that, you watch the fans going up for it and it shot past them before they stood up for the ball,” Youkilis said.

When John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino took over the Red Sox in 2002, there had been considerable conversation about moving on from Fenway Park. Instead, the new ownership group reinvigorated the park as much as they could — the narrow seats and obstructed views notwithstanding. Still, the park saw a slew of other changes that 2003 season with the addition of an expanded concourse beneath the bleachers, a picnic area behind the right-field seats and an increased number of concession stands and bathrooms. The scoreboard was revamped as well with the re-addition of the National League scores after a 27-year absence, sitting next to the existing American League scores.

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But it was the Monster seats that had — and still have — the biggest impact on the ballpark experience.

“It made us feel like it wasn’t nearly as sacred as perhaps we ourselves had approached it initially,’ architect Janet-Marie Smith told The Associated Press in 2003 before the seats were opened. “With only fewer than 300 seats up there, it’s hardly a gesture toward changing the capacity or the ambiance. It’s about giving fans a chance to sit on top of one of the most revered monuments in all of major league sports.”

Twenty years later, it’s hard to imagine Fenway without them.

“I remember the first time I saw them,” O’Brien said. “Like they’d been here forever and I knew they weren’t, but you kind of do a double take. I can remember sitting down here watching (Carl Yastrzemski) beat Mark Fidrych with a two-run homer late in the game into the net. You see it now, and it feels so seamless it feels like it’s been there for 100 years.”

(Photo: Billie Weiss / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images)