No, Kirk Cousins isn’t walking through that door.

The Minnesota Vikings — the organization perpetually in search of a franchise quarterback — will instead resume their choppy journey with young J.J. McCarthy, the 10th pick of the 2024 draft, who’s set to return from a seven-week absence and make his third NFL start Sunday in Detroit.

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The dudes in purple don’t need a blast from the past, and thus won’t be trading for a 37-year-old whose most recent performance, as an Atlanta Falcons fill-in, didn’t exactly evoke memories of his glory days.

What the Vikings could really use as we prepare to turn back the clocks an hour is something a bit more extreme: a time machine.

Since March of 2024, when Cousins left Minnesota to sign a four-year, $180-million deal with the Atlanta Falcons at the start of free agency, the Vikings have ripped through a slew of quarterbacking scenarios that involve some of the NFL’s most productive passers of the moment. In less than a year, the Vikes tried to trade up for Drake Maye, enjoyed a season of Sam Darnold’s renaissance, spurred Daniel Jones’ revival and pondered a high-profile overture from Aaron Rodgers.

All of those QBs are playing at a high level for teams with winning records.

The Vikings (3-4), a team ostensibly built to win now, are still struggling to identify their triggerman of the present and future.

If, as Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, Minnesota is in danger of becoming the NFL’s Exhibit A.

When you lead the league in cash spending ($343 million in 2025) and have already lost more games before Halloween than you did in the entire 2024 regular season, there will be plenty of second-guessing, both from inside and outside the franchise’s state-of-the-art training facility.

Knowing what they know now, if the Vikings’ powerbrokers (owners Zygi and Mark Wilf, general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and head coach Kevin O’Connell) could request a do-over, they might well pursue a different strategy at the sport’s most important position.

Instead, as all of us must, the last-place Vikings will live in the moment.

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