THERE'S something disorienting about it, even watching it back now. It’s not the teams or the names or the faces or the different sponsor logos or even the aspect ratio of the whole thing.
No, instead, it’s the scale.
We’re now exactly 20 years on from that day at the 'G between Essendon and North Melbourne and if anything, the sheer magnitude of it all has only become more incomprehensible. The scoring is other-worldly stuff, sure, but it’s more than that too: It’s how it unfolds, the when, the time left when it all starts snowballing.
‘THE BIGGEST COMEBACK IN AFL HISTORY’ IS STREAMING NOW IN Incredible Comebacks in AFL ON DEMAND
Reliving it again, you can literally see and hear the moment when everyone involved makes the same realisation: It’s on. What’s so staggering about that moment, and where the disorientation comes in, is that it arrives midway through the second quarter with the better part of 50 points separating the teams, a sentence that makes no sense even as you type it.
Comebacks aren’t supposed to work like this. We’re only days removed from an archetype in the genre, from Collingwood completing their comeback against Richmond in the customary way that comebacks are made: late. That might be to oversimplify things but there is an art to timing your run, to hitting the crescendo of a comeback deep enough into the game that any swings or counter measures become stifled by time.
No one told Essendon, though.
‘THE BIGGEST COMEBACK IN AFL HISTORY’ IS STREAMING NOW IN Incredible Comebacks in AFL ON DEMAND
A somewhat overlooked element of the greatest comeback of them all is that most of the deficit was erased in a single quarter, before half-time. When you watch the highlights it’s almost mind-bending to glimpse at the score bug in the top right. North Melbourne on 91 that early genuinely reads like a typo, and while admittedly this was a new-millennium juggernaut in their pomp, trying to understand Essendon’s 10-minute slashing of that lead through the prism of today’s tighter footy is like trying to understand Tenet.
But sport does this from time to time. They’re not common occurrences but when they start to unfold you quickly know. Somehow the normal dynamics have been replaced with something else, a game temporarily existing in its own micro environment where the ceiling of what’s possible is raised almost to the point of removal.
Almost 20 years ago to the day, footy witnessed perhaps its greatest ever example of exactly that.
‘THE BIGGEST COMEBACK IN AFL HISTORY’ IS STREAMING NOW IN Incredible Comebacks in AFL ON DEMAND
Incredible Comebacks is a bingeworthy series from the vault on AFL On Demand, a series of games that were seemingly all over, where walking away with a win would take a football miracle. Incredible Comebacks are those miracles.
