Review: The Eagles came to say ‘Goodbye.’ But — hello! — they won’t stay gone for long.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The legendary rock band the Eagles announced in July that their current tour, titled “The Long Goodbye,” would officially be their las —

Ah, sounds familiar, right? An aging act performing what’s marketed as a farewell tour, only to later decide to return after all?

Well, here we go again, apparently: Even though Don Henley is now 76 and Joe Walsh is now 75 — and even though, when they made their summer announcement, they quite clearly said that “everything has its time, and the time has come for us to close the circle” — it turns out (spoiler alert!) the Eagles aren’t done with us quite yet.

“I thought this was gonna be goodbye,” the co-founding drummer started to explain on Tuesday night to the full house at Spectrum Center, nearly two-thirds of the way through what many believed would be the last show the Eagles would ever perform in Charlotte. “But ...”

You know what? Let’s have him hold that thought.

Let’s start here instead: Tuesday marked my third time seeing the Eagles perform inside the big arena in uptown Charlotte since April 2018, and back then, Vince Gill and the then-twentysomething Deacon Frey (son of the late, great, incomparable co-founder Glenn) were still trying to earn their wings as new additions.

They each sounded perfectly fine in their own right. Wonderful, actually. It’s just — well, change can be hard. It didn’t yet feel right.

But this modern-day incarnation of the band has actually gotten better with age, and today, I couldn’t imagine the lineup without Gill, and his mellifluous handling of songs like “New Kid in Town” and “Lyin’ Eyes”; or without the younger Frey, and the way he so lovingly channels his dad on hits like “Already Gone” and “Take It Easy.”

On top of that, there’s Henley, who — dressed in a black pants and a black vest over a white pinstripe shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows — literally sounded like a man half his age on Tuesday night.

If you did an actual side-by-side comparison of “Desperado” or “Hotel California,” sure, there’s a good chance you’d be able to tell a big difference between the old studio versions and his current live renditions. That said, I was astonished by his ability to so closely re-produce what I remembered in the moment to be how the vocals sounded on “The Boys of Summer,” a song he recorded as a solo artist in 1984 at age 37.

He made singing that song in particular (even the upper-register notes in the chorus) look so effortless.

Walsh, on the other hand, makes nothing look easy. OK, the guitar-playing, maybe. But not the singing. With every word Walsh warbles, “he makes” — as his bandmate Timothy B. Schmit explained on stage Tuesday — “incredible faces.” To put it another way, they look like the expressions I’ve seen people wear right after they’ve eaten something really, REALLY sour. Or when they’ve taken a hard shot to the groin.

Meanwhile, although his voice may be aging slightly less well than Henley’s, Walsh makes up for it with his originality.

From a musical standpoint, that means diverting from the Eagles’ tried-and-true five-part harmony formula by temporarily turning them into a rock band when taking the lead on songs like “In the City” and “Life’s Been Good,” or by squawking through the talk-box on “Rocky Mountain Way.”

More generally speaking, that means just being the same old nutjob he’s been for as long as we’ve known him.

Case in point: In setting up “Life’s Been Good,” Walsh joked, “We’ve been here many times in the past. Some of which I remember, some of which I don’t. I do know that I stayed up for three days one night here. I don’t remember where I was at, but according to the police reports, I had a good time.”

He then made a big production about wanting the crowd to be ready for a moment in the song when he’d shout, “Hey, you know what?” (to which fans were supposed to yell back, “What??”) ... but when he finally made the call — just as he came out of the song’s iconic 2-1/2-minute guitar solo — his mouth wasn’t close to the mic, so only a small fraction of people gave response. That, to me, is SO Joe.

As for the overall concert, Tuesday night’s offered a greatest-hits-geared setlist that ran 2 hours and 10 minutes — more than half an hour shorter than the higher-concept show the Eagles staged here in February 2022. (That one included two sets, the first consisting of a live re-creation of their seminal 1976 album “Hotel California,” performed in sequence, in its entirety.)

At the same time, there were also moments of deja vu. For instance, the first time Henley addressed the crowd during “The Long Goodbye” concert in Charlotte, he said: “We are mighty glad to be here to play these songs for you. At this point in time, we’re pretty much glad to be anywhere.”

He told pretty much the exact same joke at the last show here. Not that that’s a problem. I mean, I think the Eagles would probably rather be consistent than full of surprises.

And — oh, wait, speaking of surprises: One of the biggest at Tuesday night’s show had nothing to do with the headliner at all.

It is, of course, impossible to put a number on exactly how many people in the crowd were caught off guard when it wasn’t Steely Dan that emerged as the opening act; but if I were to make a case for the Doobie Brothers’ fill-in appearance being a significant curveball to those in attendance, I’d point to the couple of “wait-I’m-confused” texts from friends seated in other parts of the building, and to the stranger next to me who leaned over — while DB co-founder Pat Simmons was singing “Jesus Is Just Alright” — to ask, “Uh, were they supposed to be here?”

The answer is yes. Steely Dan lead singer Donald Fagen is recovering from an undisclosed illness that forced his group to break from the tour more than a month ago.

Since then, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Sheryl Crow, Steve Miller Band, Gill (as a soloist), and now The Doobie Brothers have taken turns teeing things up for the Eagles. “Sloppy seconds indeed,” Simmons quipped early in his group’s hour-long set.

The Doobs, by the way, were here in Summer 2022 as part of their 50th anniversary tour. Steely Dan was in town around the same time, on a separate tour. But while they’re both led by 75-year-old guys, neither characterized the tours “farewells.” Only the Eagles did.

Which brings us back to Henley’s mid-show revelation: “I thought this was gonna be goodbye, but our manager told me today that we’re coming back here next year.”

Beyond that, Henley was light on specifics about an encore presentation, only acknowledging that one of the reasons for mounting another return was because the show he was in the middle of performing had “sold out in about two minutes.”

On the spot, I checked my email for a press release, but found nothing. I also went to the band website to find the list of “Long Goodbye” shows had not been updated recently. I shrugged. I wasn’t sure what to think. On the one hand, I highly doubted Henley just decided to make that conversation up; on the other, I thought it was possible their manager just meant “coming back to North Carolina.” To Greensboro, perhaps.

Then at 8 a.m. Wednesday, just shy of nine hours after the Eagles’ Charlotte concert ended, the band officially announced a return.

They’ll be back at Spectrum Center on Saturday, March 16 (it’s one of seven freshly added wintertime U.S. dates), with tickets going on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, Nov. 17.

“The Long Goodbye” is right.

But we might as well take it. As long as Henley, Walsh, Schmit, Gill and Frey continue to be able to produce pristine, live-in-concert replicas of their greatest ’70s- and ’80s-era hits, we might as well let them come back here to say goodbye as many times as they darn well please.

Eagles’ setlist

1. “Seven Bridges Road”

2. “Take It Easy”

3. “One of These Nights”

4. “Lyin’ Eyes”

5. “Take It to the Limit”

6. “Best of My Love”

7. “Witchy Woman”

8. “Peaceful, Easy Feeling”

9. “Tequila Sunrise”

10. “In the City”

11. “I Can’t Tell You Why”

12. “New Kid In Town”

13. “Life’s Been Good”

14. “Already Gone”

15. “The Boys of Summer”

16. “Funk #49”

17. “Life in the Fast Lane”

18. “Heartache Tonight”

Encore:

19. “Rocky Mountain Way”

20. “Desperado”

21. “Hotel California”