Last year’s seasonal page auto-recovers because it kept the equity it built the previous season and that equity reactivates when demand returns. A page that stayed live retains the rankings, links, and history it earned, so as seasonal interest and the associated freshness and demand signals come back and Google recognizes the recurring relevance, the page can climb back toward its old position without a rebuild. The recovery is the predictable result of retained equity plus returning demand, not luck, though it is observed behavior worth confirming against your own pages.
The retained equity is the first half of the mechanism. Because the page was left at a stable URL rather than taken down, everything it accumulated stayed attached to it: the inbound links, the ranking history, the track record Google has for that URL on its query. During the off-season the page may drift down as interest fades and fresher results take its place, but the underlying signals do not vanish. The page is still indexed, still trusted on its topic, and still holds the foundation it built, simply dormant while demand is low.
The returning demand is the second half. When the season comes back around, search interest for the query rises again, and Google’s read of relevance and freshness for that query shifts to match. The system recognizes that this page has served the recurring intent before and already carries the signals that earned it, so it has a strong reason to surface it again. The combination of a page that never lost its equity and a query whose demand has reignited is what lets the page recover on its own, often quickly, rather than needing to be rebuilt and re-proven from scratch.
The practical move is to keep the page live so it can auto-recover, then refresh it to help it along. Leave the URL stable through the off-season instead of unpublishing it, and a few weeks before demand returns, update the content with current details and dates and re-share it. Let the retained equity and returning demand do the lifting, and use the refresh to push the page back to the top faster than it would manage alone.