“Like sands through the hourglass”

LORELAI: Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Gilmores of our lives.

Lorelai references Days of Our Lives, a very long-running television soap opera which first aired in 1965. The title sequence shows an hourglass with sand trickling through it, while the voiceover says, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”.