And so Sally can stop waiting. Exactly 15 years after their breakup on August 28, 2009 — and 30 years after the release of their debut album, Sure Maybeon August 29, 1994 — Britpop icons Oasis announced on Tuesday that they will reunite next summer for a run of 14 shows in the UK and Ireland, with more shows in other countries.

“The guns have fallen silent,” the band said in a statement. “The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see it. It won’t be televised.”

According to reports, the perpetually feuding brothers at the heart of the venture — lead singer Liam Gallagher, 51, and lead songwriter and guitarist Noel Gallagher, 57 — have promised to tolerate each other’s existence long enough to perform their biggest hits live a few times and earn an estimated £400 million (around $528 million) in return.

The fans’ reactions were ecstatic.

To those who haven’t followed the past 15 years of breathless will-or-won’t-it rumors and bitter fraternal feuds, such euphoria — not to mention the half-billion-dollar payout it will likely yield — may seem like overkill. Oasis? You mean the guys with the eyebrows and the accent who sang that song from “Wonderwall” and imitated the Beatles?

Why are people still interested in Oasis?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since the Sunday Times of London first reported on a possible reunion last weekend. It’s a question I should be able to answer.

I fell in love with Oasis after watching the music video for “Live Forever” on MTV at age 12. The following year, I covered my first Oasis song (“Some Might Say”) in my first band. I spent the rest of the ‘90s scouring local record stores for import CD singles filled with otherwise unavailable Oasis B-sides. Now—more than a quarter century after Oasis released an album that actually mattered in real time—I’m vaguely considering flying to England for one of these reunion shows.

So I’m going to try (even if it’s just to tell my side of the story before my wife files for divorce).

First of all: Oasis wasn’t popular for long, but when they were popular, they were very popular indeed. Sure Maybe (which is being reissued on Friday in deluxe, 30th anniversary form) was the fastest-selling debut in British history. Its follow-up, (1995’sWhat’s the story) Morning Glory?sold 345,000 copies in the UK in one week, 4 million copies in the US by the end of 1996, and over 22 million copies overall — making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. Listeners had streamed “Wonderwall” approximately 2 billion times on Spotify as of Tuesday morning, outselling every Taylor Swift song except “Cruel Summer.”

Of course, Hootie & the Blowfish sold tens of millions of albums in the ’90s, too — and they, too, are planning to reunite next summer. But there’s a reason the Internet isn’t quite as obsessed with Hootie. From the beginning, Oasis sought something rarer than commercial success — they wanted (and thus claimed) to be “the biggest band in the world.” Both elements of that equation — the big part and the band part — were integral.

At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, greatness meant something different before social media sorted us into a billion algorithmic silos. The 1990s were the last gasps of mass culture: the shared experience of everyone caring about (or at least being aware of) the same thing at the same time.

In 1996, 2.5 million people — a full 4% of the British population — applied for tickets to Oasis’ huge open-air shows at Knebworth; around half a million people turned up. Liam and Noel were front-page news: their fights with each other, their fights with rival bands, and occasionally, their music. Gallagher haircuts proliferated; so did Gallagher parkas.

Pop stars can still be ‘big’, of course. But virality is fleeting; distractions are always just a click away. The first single from Morning Glory landed on April 25, 1995 (“Some Might Say”); the sixth (!) and final arrived on May 13, 1996 (“Champagne Supernova”). These days, it’s impossible for a single album to hold an audience’s attention for that long. In the ’90s, though, you could have a persistent, ubiquitous presence in the culture — and that, in turn, could make fans feel like they were part of something bigger than themselves.

Oasis weren’t just big pop stars either. They were a big band. They came from the working-class suburbs of Burnage, Manchester. They spent their late teens and early twenties on benefits. They rehearsed in the basement of a club. They had two guitars, a bass, drums and a singer with a tambourine. They were loud. They weren’t exactly polished. They recorded a demo tape. The president of Creation Records happened to see their opening set in a Glasgow bar. Their first single, “Supersonic”, was released 11 months later.

Being in a band isn’t the only way to make music. It’s also not the best way — despite Noel’s reactionary, rockist claims to the contrary. (There is no best way.) But it is a beloved way, historically, from the Crickets to the Beatles to Led Zeppelin to Queen to the Clash to U2 to REM to Nirvana to … you get the idea. The fact that “the band thing” seems “pretty dead” these days, as Noel recently put it, will inevitably make some people yearn for its specific alchemy — the magic of individuals becoming more than the sum of their parts.

“The great stories that we all see in documentaries — that’s not possible anymore,” Noel continued. “I don’t think the story of five guys from social housing going and doing what we did is possible anymore.”

You can decide for yourself whether the Oasis story is still possible. But this much seems true: Oasis were probably the last band to make us — the fans — believe that their story could be our story.

And that’s where the real music comes in. All that stuff I mentioned above — the arrogance, the aspiration, the camaraderie, the connection — is there in the songs and the sounds they made together. Starting in 1997, Noel’s melodies began to lose focus and Liam’s growl began to fray. The gibberish took over; grandiosity became bloated. But that first burst of creativity, from “Supersonic” to “Champagne Supernova,” was special.

Why? Because song after song after song, it was about one simple, essential theme: transcending your lot in life, just as Oasis had done. Transcending your socioeconomic status (“Cigarettes & Alcohol”). Transcending your roots (“Half the World Away”). Transcending your anonymity (“Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”). Transcending your loneliness (“Acquiesce”). Transcending your mortality even (“Live Forever”). Somehow, these songs sounded like transcendence too, especially when everyone was singing along in an arena, a pub, a football pitch: Liam’s yearning vocals, Noel’s airy melodies, the band’s unified roar.

“(Oasis) promised that a miraculous collective recovery was just around the corner, that anything was possible if we just believed in each other unequivocally,” Alex Niven wrote in his little 2014 book about Definitely Maybe. “Where else in pre-millennial culture would you find such an unashamed, affirmative use of the word We?”

The promise of next summer’s Oasis reunion – assuming Liam and Noel don’t kill each other first – is the promise of that word We. It’s even rarer now, after the millennium, than before. But millions of fans still believe they can find some kind of transcendence together in a stadium, if only for a few hours. That seems to me to be something to care about — and to wait for.

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