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In a 2012 “Portlandia” sketch, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen play “Battlestar Galactica” fans who discover the show on DVD and are devastated when they reach the end. So they go out, find a writer, hire actors and make one more episode themselves.

This, writ large, has become Netflix’s business model. It made more “Arrested Development.” It made “Wet Hot American Summer” into a series. And now, raising cheers from Stars Hollow to Santa Monica, comes word that it is preparing a new, limited-run edition of “Gilmore Girls.”

I love “Gilmore Girls” — love the repartee and the deep feelings, loved it enough to have once put it on a list of the 100 best TV shows of all time. So it is with love that I tell you this: Netflix is not bringing “Gilmore Girls” back, even if it brings back something called “Gilmore Girls.”

Or put more precisely, Netflix can’t bring back the version of “Gilmore Girls” that should have been — the proper ending, a seventh and final season of the show, written and overseen by its creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, who left the series after season six. (A seventh, for-now-final and vastly inferior season was produced under new management.)

A new “Gilmore Girls” may be witty, heartfelt and great. I hope so. But it will be a different thing, no matter how much of the original talent returns, because there’s one thing even the best-funded, best-intentioned reboot can’t restore: lost time.

“Gilmore Girls” went off the air in 2007. A reboot, if it happens, will appear nearly a decade later. That unfortunate seventh season can’t be unmade. Edward Herrmann, who played the patriarch Richard Gilmore, died in 2014. Rory (Alexis Bledel) may have become the next Christiane Amanpour and Lorelai (Lauren Graham) may have had adventures in the meantime, but we won’t have been around to see them do it. They’re older now. You’re older now.

The immutability of time, of course, is one of those realities that entertainment exists to deny. Netflix has become a kind of digital “Peter Pan”: If you clap hard enough and believe, your beloveds never have to die. Where you lead, to paraphrase the “Gilmore Girls” theme song, it will follow. And Netflix isn’t alone: Fox is giving us more “X-Files,” Showtime is reviving “Twin Peaks,” the movies brought back “Veronica Mars.”

Sometimes the appeal is about trying to relive your youth — it’s the next best thing to rebooting your late grandma, your first kiss and the taste of hot cocoa after sledding on a snow day. Then again, many of today’s “Gilmore Girls” fans only started watching when Netflix added the full series a year ago. At most, they’re trying to relive last fall.

Indeed, that’s another, flip-side effect of streaming TV — the compression of time and history. Seven years seem to fly by in a binge. Where past TV watchers waited a week for another episode, months for another season, you simply click “More.” That’s the sweet, indulgent promise of streaming: There should always be more!

But in the real world there isn’t. Things end. And when you go back later to recreate them, they come at a price. Netflix’s 2013 “Arrested Development” was a fascinating experiment in nonlinear storytelling. But in all but the technical sense it was not really a fourth season: It was a different thing, darker, sadder, touched by time and age.

Arguably the most seamless recent reboot was “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp,” and that was partly because the original comedy played up the farce of grown actors playing teenagers, in a tribute to the summer-camp movies of their own youth.

That said, the Netflix algorithm knows me too well: Of course I’ll watch a new “Gilmore Girls.” Arguably the dialogue was always the star of the original, and Ms. Sherman-Palladino still has a knack for it, as her short-lived comedy “Bunheads” proved. It’s too tempting to see her finally get the chance to write the series’ final four words, which she has told interviewers she’s had in mind for years.

But for the reboot to be good, it probably can’t be the same — it will need to be informed by the lost time, and not deny it. Go ahead and take us back to Stars Hollow, Netflix. But you can’t take us back to 2007.