Todd, YES to your first question!
Second answer is not so simple. Not sure of what delay you would expect to see! But I would think that many would have similar dates due to "batch shipping" See below..... Months to weeks before your car was built would certainly be the case. Only in the US could you expect to see "weeks" or days......
To Doug's comments:
He potentially "could" have an "over the counter" replacement, which would most certainly be manufactured after his original.......as indicated by the date casting. But any block stamped with a number longer than the number on the VIN plate is likely a Ford passenger car engine....swapped in.
Ford likely shipped DeT "batches" of engines at a time. These came from orders for spare parts, and they were NOT pulled from production. The Mangusta guys discovered that a large batch of their engines were all produced at about the same time and all shipped in one batch, excluding the HiPo 289 cars at the beginning of prototyping and production, and the late cars...... AND then there was the strike at the assembly plant and DeT grabbed whatever he could get including industrial pump/generator engines! Who knows when they were cast, but they were painted baby poop yellow originally!
Cheers!
Steve