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Anybody get the feeling Shane Warne's missing the big time? His pronouncement this week that he's available for another pop at the Ashes next year suggests he is.
This is the same Shane Warne who retired from test cricket early last year unchallenged as the game's greatest legspinner after playing a key role in Australia's regaining of the little urn with a 5-0 whipping of England last year.
He stepped aside with a record 708 wickets in his pocket and will forever be known as the bloke who, after years of fast men pounding batsmen round the globe, made spinning sexy again.
Since retiring, he led Hampshire in English county cricket, until recently announcing his retirement from the first-class game, and he's captained the Rajasthan Royals to the top of the Indian Premier League.
Now the Ashes are round the corner - well, a year away actually but for both countries you get the distinct impression the next few months are a glorified preparation for the battle for the little urn. And Warne, 38, has stepped forward to present his case for a return.
"If I wanted to keep playing I don't think there would be an issue with me being the No 1 spinner and performing," he said.
To which Australian captain Ricky Ponting, who you'd imagine might have a say in that, and Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland have responded with a bucket of ice.
You can imagine them rolling their eyes. "Warnie's at it again," they'd have thought.
When he retired, his legend, warts and all, was set. As it was with Mark Spitz, Michael Jordan, Bjorn Borg and George Foreman, among countless others.
So why do great sporting athletes so often struggle to let go? The spotlight must be intoxicating, especially when you've occupied it for a fat chunk of your life.
Spitz won seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics 36 years ago, picking up world records each time. He was perhaps the greatest of all swimming champions, certainly among the most telegenic.
So what possessed him, in 1991 at 41, to attempt a comeback for the following year's Barcelona Olympics? The small matter of a reputed US$1 million ($1.27 million) from celebrated Olympic filmmaker Bud Greenspan if he qualified might have tickled his interest. Maybe pride, too. And he did produce better times than his gold medal-winning ones, but time had marched on quicker in the pool than in life.
Everyone remembers Jordan as basketball's greatest player, but shudder at his two-season comeback for the Washington Wizards at 38 in 2001.
Borg retired in January 1983 at 26 as one of tennis' all time greats, winner of five Wimbledons and six French Opens, only to return when the bug bit eight years later. Armed ludicrously with his trusty old wooden racquets, he was cannon fodder for the young, hungry graphite wielders.
Foreman, as it happens, is among the most successful of the legion of old pugs who could not get the ring out of their system. Joe Louis, Evander Holyfield, Muhammad Ali, Archie Moore, Thomas Hearns, take your pick.
At 45, Foreman, having turned his life round and become a church minister, and cooked up a storm on his grill, became the oldest world heavyweight champion in 1994, 20 years after rumbling in the Zairean jungle with Ali and years after packing it in.
But in November, 1994, way behind on points in the final round to Michael Moorer - to whom he conceded 19 years - Foreman's sledgehammer right dropped Moorer like a rock. So a happy ending, if not for Moorer, and griller sales went through the roof.
This sounds for all the world as if Warne was thrown a lob, like "fancy another crack at the Poms mate?"
A smart bloke would have grinned and let it go outside the off stump. But where's the fun in that for the old headline hogger?
