MILWAUKEE — It was an event — a description that cuts both ways.

Meaning that The Who’s show in Milwaukee Tuesday night could have consisted of zither music and they would have gotten away with it. With the buildup this show received, it could have featured the band playing a 20-minute version of Pop Goes the Weasel.

But they didn’t try to get away with anything in the two-hour show. They played hard and well, satisfying the appetites of the 12,000 fans who wished it would never end.

Any show that opens with My Generation — the original punk-rock song — is not to be taken lightly, especially when it’s The Who that’s performing it.

Tuesday night’s show conjured up that hysteria of the ’60s, a time when The Who was leading a bristling pack of rebels against everything. By ending with Twist and Shout, it seemed a salute to those days and to John Lennon who was shot to death two years ago today.

The show proved The Who can still play it, even if there isn’t anyone to lead anymore.

This is the last time around for the British band that started as a gang of punks from London 18 years ago. The years have seen them go from wise guys who broke their instruments at the end of their shows to safer and consistently unsurprising rockers. In the process, much of rock itself has also gone from wildness to safety.

Now when Roger Daltrey screams on Won’t Get Fooled Again, it is in celebration — not terror.

Still, they are probably the ultimate rock band — very male and if you don’t like it, tough.

But they are living to regret the line “hope I die before I get old” — which their drummer, Keith Moon, did four years ago.

The survivors — guitarist Pete Townshend, lead singer Roger Daltrey and bass-player John Entwhistle — are ready to hang it up in hate for the road and each other, not necessarily in that order.

So, this last waltz stirred up enough hype to make Bo Derek a senator and, in Milwaukee, president.

If you have been conscious at any time in the last two months, you know how this show came to be. The band didn’t think the Milwaukee

Arena was big enough until a disc jockey did a balancing act for 15 days on a downtown Milwaukee building and petitions were signed — even by Terry Kohler, the man who wanted to be governor when he grew up.

Darn, if it wasn’t worth the buildup. For 23 songs, you completely forgot that these guys don’t really like each other and barely said anything to each other on stage. Of course, what’s there to say after 18 years? How’s the wife?

The power was still there. So was Pete Townshend’s leg kicks and Roger Daltrey’s microphone acrobatics. These geezers played ferociously.

Townshend — as writer and guitar wizard, he is the heart of the band — choked the solos out of his guitar and made the songs come to life. He whirled and twisted like a hip Houdini struggling to get out a trap.

The show featured almost every trademark song the band has played in its 18-year career — Can’t Explain, Baba O’Riley, Pinball Wizard, and several songs from Quadraphenia.

The Who’s shows have always been larger than life, featuring lots of bright lights and explosions that lighted up the Arena like a disco.

They served that up and more Tuesday night. And musically they sounded great even if Townshend didn’t break his Stratocaster.

It’s a mark of this band that they can take bash-it-up club-rock and make it explode in the barnlike Milwaukee Arena, a place that has the acoustics of a open field.

It was all that had been expected, even hotter because there is no more to follow it.