I looked in the mirror and redid my space buns again. I was wearing a shimmery pink and gold dress with sneakers, and my wallet was stuffed with packets of fruit snacks. My friend wanted to line up five hours early for Hilary Duff’s show at The Wiltern in Los Angeles. The queue had technically started at 3 a.m. the night before, but it was still manageable once we arrived.

This was Duff’s Small Rooms, Big Nerves tour, traveling only to London, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Hundreds of thousands of fans fought for tickets.

Duff’s first album in over a decade, “Luck… or Something,” debuted Friday. The title “hits a lot of questions that I get asked a lot. ‘How are you the normal one? And how did you escape all of these childhood stardom things?’ And I can give certain things credit, or I can also give myself credit,” Duff told Variety.

Fans like me found a friend in Duff’s beloved Disney Channel character, Lizzie McGuire, in the 2000s. But it wasn’t Lizzie who chose to step into pop music as a teen (well, except for that one time in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie”). It was Duff. And it’s Duff, now, who is coming back to music at the perfect time.

“It feels like my old self and my new self blended together,” Duff says about creating her new album, in an adorable Billboard video where her son interviews her.

This is a gift to fans who look back on the singer’s teen discography affectionately but are excited to walk through adulthood with her, too.

Her 2003 and 2004 albums, “Metamorphosis” and “Hilary Duff,” kept me company during my tween years. I was one kid in a worldwide chorus pressing play on a Boombox and singing “So Yesterday” to the mirror. Those times feel sacred, in hindsight.

Over two decades later, I’m surrounded by people like me, who took Duff’s music to heart and kept it close. The Wiltern is brimming with superfans. Some are scolded for pressing up against the doors before they open. Others are trying to secure merch quickly. The current Duff era shows the singer in a brown sweater, black boy shorts trimmed in lace, and sheer thigh-high black tights. She continues this color scheme in her “Mature” music video. At the end, a butterfly lands on her cheek, a symbol familiar to longtime fans.

“Watching the butterfly go towards the sky/ I wonder what I will become,” Duff sings to us, mimicking the poetry as her hand gracefully flutters upward. My friend films me during another special throwback: “Forget about the reasons why you can’t in life/ And start to try/ ’Cause it’s your time/ Time to fly.”

As cool as it is to see Hilary Duff across the room from me singing “Fly,” “Metamorphosis” and “What Dreams Are Made Of,” her new music draws me in and tugs on my heartstrings, too.

“We Don’t Talk” addresses her relationship with her sister, Haylie. “We come from the same home, the same blood/ A different explanation but the same thought/ People ask me if I’ve seen you/ And honestly I hate it ’cause the truth is that I need you/ But there’s no way to relay it.”

“Future Tripping” finds Duff premeditating on anxiety: “I’m worried about/ Shit that hasn’t happened/ Entertaining every doubt/ Oh, here I go again.” Story of my life.

Hilary’s music is so honest. She traces the contours of conflict in “Weather for Tennis.” Her lead single, “Mature,” is one I find singable and indirectly relatable. Even though I’ve never been in an age-gap relationship, I’ve spent time looking back on who I was “before I got smarter.”

Her biggest collaborator on “Luck… or Something” is her husband, Matthew Koma, the producer, songwriter and Winnetka Bowling League frontman. He and Duff have three daughters and he’s stepdad to her son, Luca. The pair met working on Duff’s 2015 album “Breathe In. Breathe Out.”

Listening to Winnetka Bowling League’s “Sha La La” side by side with Duff’s “Roommates,” I know the artists understand wanting to return to easier, freer times in relationships, and in life.

“I want the highlights, ten out of ten/ The butterflies from holding your hand,” Duff sings on “Roommates.” “I miss the us where we were both excited/ You could tell by the Verizon bill we’d talk all night and never sleep,” Koma sings on “Sha La La.”

Maybe the people making pilgrimages to see Duff in concert have felt this way, too. We don’t always care to revisit our pasts, but sometimes we want little pieces back.

I’ve seen beloved acts perform in venues where fans are far more interested in the nostalgic songs than the newer tracks. Though Duff knew we wanted to hear the hits, she encountered a crowd that was excited to hear “Roommates,” “Mature” and the three then-unreleased songs from “Luck… or Something,” too.

It felt like there was a feedback loop between Duff and us. Seeing us make heart signals at her, she made eye contact and hearted us back.

Seeing Duff so moved by the love from the audience, in turn, moved us.

Bringing up audience volunteers to do her internet-famous “With Love” dance, Duff announced her next step by giving them T-shirts that, combined, spelled out “World Tour Loading.”

It’s a strange experience to look into yourself and find that someone who doesn’t even know you has shaped you. While this one person can’t know her millions of fans individually, she sure has a way of turning her most human moments into art that we feel on a molecular level.

In a promotional album tease from Hilary Duff HQ, fans could peep new tracks while pretending to FaceTime with Duff. In one snippet, her lyrics are about growing up and facing things on our own. If we have to do that, isn’t it nice that we can come full circle and sing about it with the person who filmed an entire episode of television where her character gets her first bra, and the person who told us, “Laugh it off, let it go, and when you wake up, it will seem so yesterday?” She’s the person who’s willing to rerecord that song for people like me who still love it so much.

Duff is clearly grateful, too.

“I can’t believe I’m here again, 18 years later,” she tells us at The Wiltern, as fans scream out their love for her. “I wanted to say that there’s just been an overarching happiness and sunshine that you all have brought to these shows.”

“The world is super hard to process right now and so bleak. I want you all to know that each and every one of you here, I love you. You’re all welcome here,” she adds.

Before singing her “party anthem,” “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” hit “Why Not,” Duff gets at why we’re all here. We’re pausing “to smile and feel light” in a time of heaviness.

We’re also living out a reunion with someone who helped us grow up.

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