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Mike Shanahan is 62 and not too old to intrigue the Oakland Raiders. Mike Holmgren is 66 and too old to intrigue the San Francisco 49ers. Different courses for different horses, it seems.

Both of them have a different problem, though, at least when it comes to these two coaching jobs. It’s actually true that you cannot go home again.

Shanahan was the Raiders head coach for as long as Al Davis could stand him in the late ‘80s, and an assistant with the 49ers after that. Holmgren was an assistant in San Francisco about the same time Shanahan was in Oakland. Both jobs served as springboards to their future triumphs in Denver and Green Bay, respectively.

And now they’re on the final few turns of their career, interested in giving the NFL one more hard ride. And in both cases, it is almost surely a mistake.

Not because of their age, though. Age is a construct, and in case anyone’s noticed, Bill Belichick is 62 and Pete Carroll is 63. So shut up about age.

But one of the troublesome things about rumor milling in the NFL is that so many people think that familiar faces (which I guess could be construed as old faces, though not in the same way) are best. Raider fans have been drooling for Jon Gruden forever, and Hue Jackson about half as long -- mostly because they were there once. Nobody would mention those guys for the Raiders job if they hadn’t already done it, and again that’s a fan notion, not an owner notion.

[RELATED: Reports: Raiders interview Shanahan]

And 49er fans were treated to two generations of Nolan and the trunk and several branches of the Bill Walsh coaching tree, and Holmgren and Shanahan have been default rumors for the unwavering faithful ever since.

[RELATED: Holmgren coveted 49ers job, but team not interested]

But coming back to the old haunt after time away almost never works out well. The rare exceptions (George Halas and Jimmy Conzleman in Chicago, both of whom won titles in their second go-rounds, and Halas in his third and fourth) happened before the prevalence of color televisions, and the last two -- Art Shell in Oakland and Joe Gibbs in Washington -- were ill-fated from the start.

You hire familiar faces when you don’t have better ideas, unless you’re Halas, in which case you hire yourself because you’re the owner. And if you didn’t want better, or at least different, ideas, you wouldn’t have fired the guy you had.

And neither Mark Davis nor Jed York are in a position to reach into the past to a time which they only vaguely remember because they weren’t actually involved with the team in any meaningful way. Davis was 17 for Shanahan’s 20 games, and York was 12 when Holmgren started.

In other words, while interviewing them is good as resource material, it doesn’t much work as long-term strategy. Not only do they remember only an idealized (or in Davis’ case, slenderized) version of the past, the men interviewing are interviewing with vastly different men for vastly different reasons.

In other words, the past is not for recreating -- it’s for slapping on hoodies at $90 a throw or throwback uniforms at $275. And in the Raiders’ case, they haven’t changed their uniform design in any notable way since Al did it in 1963, and that was the ill-advised silver numbers on white jerseys era in 1970.

In short, while Holmgren and Shanahan might stir the fan base a bit, it is no reason to try and recapture what cannot be recaptured. They’re not too old. They’re just too, well, old favorites.