History doesn't repeat itself.
That old trope is a lazy, limp way to look at the grand narrative of human events. Yeah, sometimes history rhymes or even forms a nice haiku from time to time, but trying to mush two groups of people or eras together like a little girl making her toy horsies kiss is usually borne out of a desire to relive a time or place that doesn't exist anymore. Simply put: it's often base nostalgia that drives us to see patterns in history.
It's seductively easy for this to happen in sports.