To before the Australian Crime Commission and "full responsibility" and Stephen Dank and "pharmacologically experimental" and AOD-9604 and "show cause notices" and everything after.

Wipe it from your mind, and remember.

Essendon had little to roar about. They had a newly minted Brownlow medallist, yes, and the first big signing of the free agency era, Brendon Goddard, was on his way to the club. But when the news broke that something had gone horribly, terribly, awfully awry at Windy Hill, the Bombers were not much of a threat. Not really.

They had just finished 11th, a full three games out of the eight, with a list that was hard to read. They had an enviable yet developing spine. They lacked runners and class and youth. Major question marks hovered over core players. As a unit, they had made embarrassing late-season fade-outs as cliched as Richmond finishing ninth.

Notwithstanding their coaching "dream team" and the promise of new Tullamarine digs, when the full scope of the charges levelled against the proud club was revealed, it seemed that things could not get any worse.

And indeed on the field at least – despite those circumstances – things did not get worse. Not at all.

They got better. Markedly better.

Remember that? The Bombers won their first six games after the blackest day in Australian sport. There was the barnstorming away win against Adelaide. An annihilation of Melbourne by 148 points. And then the comeback that seemed impossible in the most inhospitable venue in the land.

Remember early 2013, and the rising and rampant Fremantle? This was Fremantle in the year they made the grand final, when Ryan Crowley and Hayden Ballantyne and Chris Mayne were at their ferocious and suffocating best, when Docker pressure was something people said they had truly never seen before.

The Bombers played them on a slippery night in Perth, were down by as much as 37 points, and at half-time their hero Jobe Watson had only seven touches. And yet somehow the team fought back. The win was rapturous – the most stunning of comebacks from the club that invented stunning comebacks. We were stunned, too. But why?

This was a team united. And this unification – this galvanisation – is what has been missing from discussion of the Bombers since that time. The strain of the supplements saga or injection regime or whatever you want to call it has been enormous, yes. The toll taken is as impossible to measure as it will be for the players to forget.

But why no discussion at all of the potential silver lining on footy's darkest cloud? Could this protracted entanglement not have had an oddly positive effect? Stranger things have happened than for people faced with egregious embattlement to band together and resolutely defend one another.

This group of young men has perhaps more reason to be spiritually tethered than any other. They have been locked into and bonded by a two-year trauma neither of their making nor solving. Isn't it possible that the Bombers played so well in 2013 and 2014 not in spite of their circumstances but because of them?

Would anyone argue that the players have not huddled close together with that sword of Damocles hanging over their collective head? Could anyone say the club did not bunker down and develop a siege mentality? Were these Bombers not the ultimate (instead of metaphoric) "us against them" outfit?

Performers have emerged in that time. Michael Hibberd became a truly devastating running half-back. Jake "Buckets" Carlisle has what could be the best hands in the game. The son of Tim Watson has gone to another level. Dyson Heppell is the heir apparent to Scott Pendlebury.

They would have risen anyway. Talent is a factor. But what of the rest? What of the intangible way the team gelled and played for one another as a defiant and unified mass? Whether their perceived enemy was the AFL or ASADA, have they not lined up together, arms locked, ready to do battle with all comers?

This week they were found "not guilty" of being administered performance-enhancing drugs, and this is desirable. It is right and just that they have not been called to answer for the gross and abhorrent sins of their club, but questions remain.

Of course there are questions about whether ASADA will appeal, or whether WADA will take up where they leave off. We also want to know whether James Hird will ever give the only exculpatory answer and apology the football public wants to hear – that he was naive and foolish and reckless, and that in his hubris he was duped by a common peddler that he should have more closely overseen.

But as a new season dawns and the "Whatever It Takes" Bombers prepare to play the Swans in Sydney on Saturday, we have moved on at any rate, and questions far more relevant to the average fan remain.

We wonder whether this team is the 2012 model that ran and attacked with no sense of defence, or the latter one that grimly closed ranks and hit the mattresses together in the years that followed?

We are curious to know how they will go in battle when there is no bitter war left to wage. We ask how much fight will they offer, when there is no longer a cause to defend.

Now that the Bombers no longer need to hide, which Essendon will step into view?