Oasis will turn Croker into a Tír na nOg... its devotees going to Live Forever

For a treasured 2 hours, the 90s will breathe again

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From the moment Noel strums his first guitar chord, or in the dazzling, million-watt instant the stadium lights find Liam - hands clasped behind his back, torso tilted at 45 degrees and bent into the microphone, a figure of animal magnetism, a showman swallowing the acclaim as thirstily as a late night tequila - Croke Park will transform into Tír na nÓg.

A place of eternal youth and infinite possibility, a microclimate that renders its inhabitants euphoric, supersonic and crying out for gin and tonic. A cathedral housing devotees who are going to Live Forever.

It will be the most photogenic seconds most will experience this year, a blinding eruption of communal joy. That rarest of collectors’ items - a victory over time.

For a two hour wonderland of escapism, there will not be a single urge to speed back to the future. Leave McFly and Doc to figure out that riddle. Meanwhile, a mass of humanity will party like its 1996.

When the 30th anniversary reunion tour was confirmed, I wrote about a night long ago in Pairc Ui Chaoimh, when so many were reduced to bondservants to the younger of the Oasis siblings' onstage magnetism.

Shimmering with lord-of-the-night vanity, a bonfire of charisma, belligerent, snarling, cocksure Liam Gallagher seized the title deeds to that Cork night and to much of the last decade of the 20th century.

And, as insolent, cultural pyromaniacs do, he immediately set them ablaze.

Feral as any creature of the night, a Manc-Irish peacock glaring at his audience from behind handsome, monobrowed, king-of-the-world features, a swaggering high priest transforming the stage into his hedonistic pulpit.