“Saving” a common block

Question

I'm dealing with some legacy code that uses COMMON blocks extensively and sometimes uses the SAVE statement. After consulting the Fortran standard, it says:

The appearance of a common block name preceded and followed by a slash in a SAVE statement has the effect of specifying all of the entities in that common block.

Under what circumstances does placing a variable in a common block not imply SAVE? Since the variable must be accessible in any other program unit that includes that common block, how could it not be SAVEed?