These are difficult days indeed for North Melbourne. And heady times for the Sydney Swans. But it wasn't always thus. In fact, May 1 is the 31st anniversary of a game which demonstrates just how dramatically football's wheel can turn.
North has been in a rut for some time now. The Roos have won just one game of their past 28, and haven't managed more than four wins in any season since 2019. Sydney, in stark contrast, is set to be part of finals for a remarkable 24th time in 29 seasons.
That's an incredible strike rate. But one unthinkable back in May 1993, when the Swans were on their knees not only as a team but an entire football organisation.
In dire straits financially, Sydney would effectively be taken over by the AFL. Embarrassed week after week on the field, the Swans had just sacked Gary Buckenara as coach and with the help of league headquarters, were attempting to entice coaching legend Ron Barassi into the role after seven years out of the caper.
As Swans former player Brett Scott stepped into the breach as caretaker coach for a second game after Buckenara's sacking, Barassi was sitting in the stands at Princes Park this Saturday afternoon to watch the hapless Swans, who were in the midst of a 26-game losing streak, take on a North Melbourne which was flying under new coach Denis Pagan.
The Roos were being newly-led on the field, too, by emerging superstar Wayne Carey, appointed captain at just 21. The gifted key forward, alongside his mate from Wagga, full-forward John Longmire, were helping North amass some huge scores.
But even they would be temporarily outshone by a sadly all-too-brief shooting star from Alice Springs called Adrian McAdam.
The gifted Indigenous forward, whose older brother Gilbert was already a fixture at St Kilda, had already made an amazing AFL debut the previous week against Richmond with seven goals.
Incredibly, he would up the ante on this afternoon, ending up with a 10-goal haul (Longmire with nine) as the Roos took the Swans apart by 124 points, finishing with 35.19 (229), still the sixth-highest score in league history.
The mercurial half-forward, who'd been picked at No. 98 in the previous year's draft, booted 10.6, have four goals away and also took one of the marks of the year.
North piled on 11 goals to one in the opening term, amazingly conceded seven goals to Sydney in the second quarter while managing only four themselves, then went berserk in the second half with 10 goals in both the third and final quarters.
As ever, North coach Pagan was careful about his charges getting ahead of themselves. "You've got to be realistic about it. They haven't got a coach, which certainly isn't a desirable situation," he said after the game.
"Sure, it was terrific to win it, and good sides bury another when they get the chance, and we did that today. But it could inflate some egos and be blown out of all proportion, which is what I'm worried about."
How Sydney would have liked to have had those sorts of worries back then.
McAdam's incredible debut season saw him rack up 60 goals in his first 12 games of league football (average 5.0) and 68 for the season in 17 games. But he'd find the going a lot tougher the following year, and after just one game in 1995, and a short subsequent tenure at Collingwood, where he failed to play a senior game, he was gone.
Not so North Melbourne, however. The Roos would have a couple of near-misses, and a heart-breaking post-siren preliminary final loss to Geelong in 1994, but won the club's third premiership in 1996 under Pagan, and another in 1999.
And remarkably, given how yawning the gap between the two clubs was that May afternoon in 1993, North Melbourne's grand final triumph just two-and-a-half years later would come against none other than a resurgent Sydney.
Barassi, after just two-and-a-half seasons in charge, and with the addition of some star talent like Tony Lockett, Paul Roos and Derek Kickett, had the Swans competitive again by the end of 1995. And after he passed the baton to Rodney Eade for 1996, Sydney took off, riding a wave of momentum all the way to grand final day, when they led the Roos by as much as four goals late in the second quarter before North eventually prevailed by 43 points.
Sydney as a football team and club, has never looked back, winning two premierships and appearing in six grand finals between 2005-22 alone.
Predicting for the North Melbourne of today a turning of the tide that dramatic would be brave indeed. But however badly the Roos are faring at the moment, even they aren't quite at the depths the Swans were back in 1993.
They say it's always darkest before the dawn. Sydney's rags-to-riches journey of the early '90s is proof enough. And the club which beat up on the Swans that May afternoon 31 years ago has at least seen the evidence itself from the closest possible quarters.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at Footyology.