While Melbourne Cup Day provided Melbourne's masses with a labor-free day last Tuesday, the latest instalments of 'The Bombers: Stories of a Great Club' continued to run down the straight unimpeded.
Although episodes 3 and 4 of theย 'Fox Sports' aired docuseries charted the Dons' lean years of the 70s and early-80s, the latest pair were bookended by premiership glory for the famous old club.
Having taken an outsider's view of the sterling stills, snippets and stories of the past fortnight, I've once again poured through the record books and pondered another set of questions that arose across the series' penultimate week.
So, before the final set of chapters are aired and completed next week, here are another 10 queries that cropped up from the recount of Essendon's most recent golden age.
Is David Parkin still dirty about the fax delay today?
Technology has come a long way since 1993.
Take stock of your belongings and the mere thought that each of us has a device in our pocket that holds the answers to unlimited queries is enough to explode the mind.
Still, if you wanted to send a thought, message or request almost 30-years ago, there were no emojis, texts or tweets, only landlines, mail or fax.
Should you show an average millennial or Zoomer a fax machine, you are likely to receive responses ranging from disbelief to complete and utter apathy.
To be completely honest, I'm still not entirely sure how these reverse printers work in totality.
And while almost anyone in the western workforce at the tail end of last millennium probably did, the procedure for posting a facsimile message were apparently lost on Neale Daniher late that September.
Ahead of the Bombers' clash with rivals Carlton in the grand final, Daniher, Kevin Sheedy's assistant at the time, had devised a plan to mute the Blues strongest note โ their star-studded midfield.
Over the course of their latest meetings, names like Williams, Bradley, Ratten, Hanna and McKay had dominated the Dons after running riot from the tap work of Jurassic Park's own Justin Madden.
Still smarting from their narrow qualifying final loss to Carlton earlier in the month, Daniher devised a specific plan to quell this engine room ascendency and fired off his dossier to Sheedy and his fellow coaching crew.
However, it also ended up in the hands of an anonymous party with ties to the opposition camp.
While this fax sent from the former skipper's workplace accidentally made its way to a work contact, Daniher himself explained that the person who received his recipe for Essendon's 15th flag was in fact a sponsor of the Carlton Football Club.
There are multiple views as to what happened next. According to the second eldest of the Ungarie-born Bomber brethren, the faceless person simply froze instead of passing on the plan to the Blues' head coach, David Parkin.
In the words of Parkin himself, this innocent bystander that was then caught between the century long firing of bullets between favelas was told that police would become involved if Daniher's dossier was passed on.
Irrespective of where the truth lies, Carlton's midfield was blunted badly during their 44-point loss in the season's decider and the blueprints to beat the Blues were only passed on after the final siren
According to Parkin, his squad's ability to best all and sundry for numerous seasons was a laughing matter at Princes Park.
"For three years we had dominated centre-bounce clearances ... from Justin Madden's around-the-clock work," he told The Herald Sun in 2013.
"For whatever reason, no one had worked us out. We pissed ourselves laughing for a while that we were able to roll along with this dominance."
However, these grins had turned to tears by โMad Monday' when Parkin finally got his hands on the Bombers' strategies.
"He said, 'I need to see you immediately'. I saw him in the social club and he produced this bloody analysis," he revealed.
"We both sat there and cried. I don't think Neale got any credit for it, but he produced the strategy to undo us.
"You talk about carrying a loss, I carried that one."
As Parkin departed the game having played key roles in five premierships, I hope he isn't still losing sleep about being the last to know why his midfield was so successfully blanketed.
Still, I'm sure that the communication breakdown is never far from the 79-year-old's mind each time the old rivals have done battle in the decades since.
