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

- ROY CURTIS

ARMED with a skeleton key capable of opening the doors to 80,000 yesterdays, Liam and Noel Gallagher will make Croke Park their playground tonight by gifting the wonder of time travel to Dublin.

Oasis in the August sunshine is - for tens of thousands of a certain age - about lifting the sometimes brutal siege of growing old.

About hitching a ride in Marty McFly's DeLorean, reversing at warp speed to the golden days when it seemed there were so few clouds in the sky.

In an arena that will be boiling with throwback excitement, there will be the inestimable prize of being transported back to the 1990s, a largely "mature" audience remembering the unbound freedom of younger days.

Of finding again that feeling they'd lost inside. Of knowing euphoria. Of not giving a f**k.

Nostalgia is multi-billion euro industry for good reason. It offers a safe space that the worst of reality is powerless to invade. It dollops the secret sauce on the meal of life.

It cures those who are homesick for the past. For those of late-middle age, it provides a market in which to trade the dullest elements of the advancing years for the multicoloured, cut-diamond dazzle of adulthood's first dawn.

Sebastian Barry writes that what age does to the face should be forbidden by statute. Tonight and tomorrow, music will act as an ointment making the lines and crevices disappear.

EUPHORIC

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.