for example, lets say i wrote an article with the keyword "best bicycles in 2009" (Example) and published it on an article site (Thus I have no access to the URL to change it)

from there, 2009 ends in just a few days, so this article will be useless to me, however if i can salvage its content I can use it again for 2010.

what would be the best way of doing this? Can i instantly delete the article and re-submit it with changed url to match 2010, along with keywords?

when google indexes my page it will see it as "duplicate" content, right? Will it then check the original content and notice its no longer there and decide not to punish me? Or should i delete the content and wait until google un-indexes it and THEN publish the updated version? Is there a chance that even though google sees the original content gone that it will still hurt me due to a history of content matching it?

basically, is there anyway to salvage and use my original content or do i just have to leave it and build a new one?

Google isn't that harsh on duplicate content. Republish to a different article site with 2010 in the title and then it will be at least on unique urls and IPs which helps.

Google can't really punish a duplicate article on an article site cause the rank and authority of that article site is indexing you, not really google as much. Now if you had 2 blogs with the same content, same IP then google would hit you.

You could always just edit the article and change it from 2009 to 2010. For ezinearticles it would have to go through the approval process again, but if it got approved the first time I don't think it would be a problem.

I think if you changed the title the URL would change as well, but I'm not 100% certain of this.

I agree with tygrus, I don't think you have to worry about being penalized for duplicate content. Content is republished all over the net everyday, and it's common for articles to be updated and revised.