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In goal-oriented networking, the usefulness of delivered information is shaped by an interplay among sampling decisions, delay uncertainty, transmission opportunities, and service dynamics. Age of Information (AoI) has provided a powerful metric for studying this interplay, revealing behaviors that often run counter to conventional intuition. This talk presents several recent results: in network connections with heterogeneous paths, route selection can reshape freshness-optimal sampling behavior. In systems with random and heavy-tailed service times, proactive preemption becomes a powerful control lever for freshness, enabling the system to tame heavy-tailed service uncertainty and substantially outperform classical non-preemptive age-optimal policies. Overall, the talk shows that random delay need not be a hindrance to freshness in networks: with the right design, it can even be turned into the system's advantage.