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The phrase to roll back the years, and its variants, mean: to evoke or recreate a previous time, state or condition; to make it seem as if no time has passed.

This phrase occurs, for example, in the following from The best bar none? Why nothing has to change at the city’s legendary Laurieston, by Norry Wilson, published in The Herald (Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland) of Sunday 22^nd October 2023 [page 18, column 2]:

Change, they say, is the only constant in life but the news that the Clancy family has put Glasgow’s iconic Laurieston Bar on the market makes me want to stop all the clocks—it makes me want to roll back the years and set me off musing on my own days and nights in the famed Bridge Street bar.

These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase to roll back the years and variants that I have found:

1-: From Elegiac Epistle, from a Lady at Charles Town, addressed to her Friend in London, published in The British Magazine and Review; Or Universal Miscellany of Arts, Sciences, Literature, History, Biography, Entertainment, Poetry, Politics, Manners, Amusements, and Intelligence Foreign and Domestic (London, England) of November 1782 [page 380, column 2]:

From climes that brightest prospects once display’d,
Too long, alas! despoil’d of all their charms;
While horrid war unsheath’d the murd’rous blade,
And hostile nations wak’d the loud alarms.

Amid’ such scenes, how shall the Muse indite!
What friendly pow’r invoke to aid her strain?
Thus to recount the hours of past delight,
And present ills for ages to remain?

Still fond remembrance will roll back the years,
Which, as they rose, bade ev’ry bliss increase;
While calm Contentment banish’d anxious fears,
And infant joy smil’d in the lap of Peace.

2-: From The Rutland Herald (Rutland, Vermont, USA) of Monday 28^th January 1799 [page 2, column 4]:

SPRINGFIELD, (MAS) JAN. 1.
Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Philadelphia to his friend in this vicinity, dated Dec. 8. 1798.

“[…] The representative body of the union had assembled to receive the communications of the supreme magistrate […]. The approach of the President was now announced. He passed the area with the accustomed ceremonies and took the Speaker’s chair.
“Here a moment intervened, before the address commenced, and gave time for contemplation to roll back the years beyond the commencement of the revolutionary war.”

3-: From a poem published in the Gazette of the United States, for the Country (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) of Friday 27^th May 1803 [page 2, column 1]:

The chieftain heard with wild dismay,
The dangers of that dreadful day,
And calling fancy up in haste,
Roll’d back the years which long had past;
He saw renew’d the scenes of woe,
The field where cruel Tarleton stood,
The savage lurking in the wood;
In every breeze he fear’d a foe.

4-: From A Visit in Canada, by ‘L.’, published in the first volume of The Worcester Magazine and Historical Journal (Worcester (Massachusetts): Printed for the Publishers, by Rogers and Griffin, 1826) [chapter 2, page 69]:

Rude and unpolished as are the inhabitants of the Chaudiere, they possess an intuitive and native sense of politeness, affording the stranger equal pleasure and surprise. […]
So primitive and simple are the manners of those with whom we were visitants, that it required no laborious stretch of imagination to overstep the distance separating us from the sunny land of France, and roll back the years between the present period and the age of her glory, the reign of the fourteenth Lewis, truly called the Magnificent, and to fancy ourselves quietly seated among the vine covered hills and green vallies of the land of their ancestors, in the period when the royal patron of genius and learning held the sceptre with a firmer grasp and wore the crown with a higher dignity, than the successors whose hands have since borne the rod of command.