The lot of the Melbourne fan has been tough lately and the outlook today is bleak. An opponent they haven't beaten in their past 10 encounters, at a ground where they've lost their past 20 games.

In fact the Demons have never won at Etihad Stadium.

Okay, they have won at the ground itself but not under its current name. The Demons' last win either under the roof, or with it open, was in August 2007. The venue was then known as Telstra Dome, and the Dees romped home against the Bulldogs. Only Nathan Jones and Lynden Dunn of their current crop represented the Demons that night, although Daniel Cross played against them.

Prior to that time, the Dees had displayed no obvious symptoms of Docklands-phobia. When the ground was known as Colonial Stadium they loved it: Death Valley it may have been to some, but Melbourne won 10 of 13. By the time Etihad won the naming rights, their record stood at a break-even 16 wins and 16 losses.

Since then, the Dees have won 37 games in five cities with a couple of draws thrown in. One year they even won an end-of-season exhibition affair in Shanghai.

But at the venue on the western edge of Melbourne's CBD, not a single premiership point has been garnered. The longest string of losses at any ground in the competition's history is University's 28 at the MCG. That was immediately prior to their dropping out of the competition, so you see Melbourne is moving into the stratosphere … or the subterranean equivalent.

So long as it's not your own team involved in these things, there's ghoulish pleasure to be had in discussing losing streaks. I feel qualified to write about them as in one dark winter during childhood the teams I supported in northern Tasmania's two competitions both went without a win.

The worst day of all was one in late July, so wet my brother and I weren't allowed to go to the footy. Relying on quarter-by-quarter scores on the radio, our hopes were sky high as "we" (Launceston) led at the last change and it was obvious we were coming home with the wind.

Eventually the final scores came through, given by the ABC announcer with the teams the wrong way round: Launceston 6-12-48, City-South 4-25-49.

In the big league it's hardly surprising University holds just about every record in this category. After a promising start in the VFL, winning 25 of 54 games in their first three years, the students lost their last 51 games in the competition.

There have been other extended feats of glorious failure with the Swans, despite two recent decades of success responsible for the modern-day benchmark. Their 26 straight defeats in 1992-93 is the longest losing streak of the past 40 years and one that almost put paid to the competition's first expansion venture.

The Sydney-siders eventually broke through in Round 13, 1993, not having run a team closer than 25 points in their previous 15 encounters. A 10-goal third quarter against … yes, Melbourne, was like a cloudburst after an endless drought. It would be the Swans' only win of the season, although failure on such a scale actually helped kick-start the northern venture. It was Sydney and Brisbane's non-competitiveness leading up to those disastrous two seasons that prompted the introduction of priority draft picks and various other game-changing leg-ups.

The same can't be said for the losing streaks Fitzroy endured in the 1960s or the 1990s. The earlier one, a forerunner to the hard times ahead, was most famous for the solitary win that punctuated it. Across five seasons from 1963 to 1967, the Lions won only 10 games, fewer even than University in its worst five years.

Through the long winters of 1963-64, Fitzroy achieved just one win in 36 games: a win so famous as to warrant a book. Ken Piesse's Miracle Match recounts how – with playing-coach, Kevin Murray, away on interstate duty – the Roys achieved a monumental upset over the year's premier team, Geelong.

The worst era endured by any club though, and by a big margin, is St Kilda's first five years in the VFL. The Saints won only two of 82 games in that period, losing 48 straight before experiencing a win.

In the last of those 48 games, a round-robin final in 1899, Geelong beat the Saints by 161 points, 23-24-162 to 0-1-1. It was by far the biggest score and biggest flogging the competition had known to that time.

The historic first win came in the Saints' next game: in the opening round of 1900. Naturally it was against Melbourne. And it occurred in circumstances to resemble the Siren-gate affair of 2006 in Launceston. This time – with scores level at full-time – the Saints came out on top, successfully arguing that Melbourne had scored a behind well after the three-quarter time siren.

On Sunday, 115 seasons later, the Saints and Demons will go at it again. This time it's the Dees who hope history's tide will turn. Perhaps there's another drought-breaker in store.