Saturday night on the hallowed grounds of the Germania Insurance Super Stage, Garth Brooks’ people showed out.

“I haven’t gotten to tour in like 100 years,” the 63-year-old country music superstar, who’s sold more than 170 million albums, told Austin. “I needed this.”

Then the showman gave his guitar, emblazoned with his signature “G” logo, to a child. We were 10 minutes in.

“Tell me it’s gonna be like this all night long,” he added, wearing dark denim, a black cowboy hat and boots.

Pretty much.

He also sported a Chris LeDoux hoodie, a tribute to the late country singer who died 20 years ago this month. Brooks was so close to him that he offered LeDoux a piece of his liver.

The concert’s reception was remarkable given the lukewarm crowd of sun-fried car people.

Before the show, rows of supporters wearing both cowboy hats and Porsche T-shirts respectfully gave each other elbow room and chatted politely. A tall man next to me streamed the Texas Longhorns game on his phone, earbuds in. Ingenious marketers hawked Michelob Ultras straight from their insulated backpack coolers. The rowdiest fan this reporter spotted was a woman who rudely pushed to the front with her apparently embarrassed teen daughter. (She later appeared on-screen mouthing along.)

Several parents sang next to their adult children, as did casual country music observers, won over by the dynamism of Brooks’ 10-piece band. His guys were bobbing and weaving like the early 2000s Duke Blue Devils; from steel guitar to slide guitar.

“Callin’ Baton Rouge” out-of-nowhere featured a live banjo, fiddle, and accordion. This blew away that excruciatingly lazy move you regularly see by so many arena acts — all their horn parts, canned, coming from an electric keyboard.

And Brooks’ show, “highly choreographed” as he put it, awakened generations. That’s because 1988 — when he was booking “La Quinta Inns” with many of the same bandmates he still performs with — doesn’t feel culturally ancient.

The 1990s still feel contemporary. That’s when Brooks was selling a million albums in a week and underground Harlem rappers were name-checking him. (“I’m down to sell records like Garth Brooks,” went a Big L lyric.)

And from “The Thunder Rolls” to “The Dance” to “Unanswered Prayers,” the 90-minute set was a perpetual dopamine rush of nostalgic pop music, perfected over 30 years. You’d see someone filming a song and then they’d wipe away a tear.

“You never know what you’re gonna get at one of these places,” Brooks said after his “Standing Outside the Fire” encore. “But you guys [expletive] rock.”

‘Anything at COTA is the worst, honestly’

You probably missed the show.

Austinites face a perennial conundrum when it comes to Circuit Of the Americas. The Saturday night F1 concert could be Taylor Swift, Stevie Wonder, Queen or Eminem — like it literally has been over the past decade — but we’d rather stay in because locals aren’t trying to venture out.

“Anything at COTA is the worst, honestly,” a colleague’s reply on Instagram read after I posted an enthusiastic Brooks pic.

It’s the traffic. It’s the out-of-towners. It’s the backdrop: A sport that the Texan mind can’t comprehend, wherein rich dorks wear T-shirts in support of German automakers. It’s not knowing where to go once you get out there. Everyone winds up walking three extra miles in the 90-degree October concrete heat trying to get oriented.

And we see that billboard on Ben White for months just before you exit onto Texas 360 teasing world-class headliners that might as well be playing on the moon.

How do you even get tickets to the Formula One concert?

The show is a value-add to race-goers. You have to purchase at least a single-day race ticket to get access to the concerts. Ticket prices are steep, but if you only care about the music,  you can arrive at 6 p.m. and walk in as most race-goers are leaving for the day. Saturday evening inbound traffic to COTA is a cinch.

‘It’s gonna be a night full of old stuff’

Brooks is the best-selling solo artist in U.S. history. Yet his storytelling prowess and underrated lyricism — “she’s my honeycomb and I’m her sugar cane” — turn him into the world’s most poetic youth pastor when he’s bantering.

He understands Southern white people with Jeff Foxworthy-grade aplomb, and this creates onstage intimacy.

“You got people that are family and then you have people that you can call at 2 a.m. and they say, ‘Where are ya?’” he said upon introducing his band, most of whom he bragged about touring with since the early ‘90s.

Fresh off a February residency in Las Vegas, Brooks fine-tuned his set into a tight retrospective. He told us that he wrote “Friends in Low Places” —one of the most well-known country songs worldwide — onstage at a bar called “Cowboys” in Dallas.

He knew it was a hit because “by the time the chorus comes along, everyone’s singing,” he said.

“I still go to concerts. And nothing pisses me off more than a guy playing all their new stuff and none of their old stuff,” he said, before delivering the hits.

That meant covers, too. Because Brooks’ career began in dives playing other people’s stuff. “Most people were so drunk they didn’t care what you played as long as they could sing along,” he said, effectively revealing the real key to his success: write exclusively hole-in-one songs that a bar patron can enjoy late-night.

As an homage to his roots, Brooks played Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” because he said he was at a point in his career where “people don’t tell you what to do” anymore. Ditto Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” George Strait’s “Amarillo By Morning” and Otis Day and the Knights’ “Shout.”

All from that Britney Spears hands-free microphone, strumming a guitar that he mostly uses “to hide my gut.”

“This is Texas,” Brooks said at the end. “I’m from Oklahoma, and you treat me like a native son.”

Y’all come back real soon.