The Bombers languish in 14th spot with a 5-9 record, their finals hopes all but shot, while the 7-7 Kangaroos are 10th and a game outside the top eight.

It's a far cry from the halcyon period between 1998 and 2001 when they won a flag each and featured in a combined four grand finals and six preliminary finals.

Given the close proximity of their respective heartlands, the two clubs have always been healthy rivals.

But Denis Pagan, who coached the Kangaroos from 1993 to 2002, recalls the genesis of the modern rivalry being the 1998 season, when his legendary Essendon counterpart Kevin Sheedy accused North officials Greg Miller and Mark Dawson of being soft as marshmallows.

The marshmallow saga culminated with fans hurling pink and white marshmallows at Sheedy following North's 22-point win over the Bombers in the 1998 qualifying final. "Kevin was the master at playing all those things up," Pagan said.

"It's one of the most vivid memories I've got of footy. He was sort of walking 10 feet in from the boundary line, but people were pelting him with marshmallows everywhere."

Sheedy has a cheeky take on the "marshmallow" game. "When it was all said and done, North Melbourne had the better side and I was just trying to get Denis a better crowd ... because North Melbourne don't know how to sell footy, but they can play."

While the master coaches look back on that period with good humour, it was a different story for the players at the time.

Between 1995 and 1998, the Kangas beat Essendon on five out of six occasions and former Essendon champion Matthew Lloyd said a big reason was North's ability to intimidate the Bombers.

Lloyd recalls a genuine hatred. "It started something," Lloyd said of the marshmallow final.

"Sheeds had the old tricks where he'd have all the [newspaper] tipsters up on the wall saying nobody rates us and it's about time we stood up to these blokes. He had you wanting to run through brick walls, more so against North Melbourne than turning up to play Fremantle or Port Adelaide at the MCG, he loved games like that.

"Obviously Carlton, Collingwood and Richmond were always big but through that period North Melbourne might not have filled a stadium like those other games, but the hatred the two clubs had for each other was as strong as any.

"[They had] established players like [Wayne] Carey, [Glenn] Archer, Anthony Stevens, Micky Martyn, Martin Pike, they were a very mature side and we probably were out of our weight division but by the '99 season ... we thought enough's enough."

Essendon finally turned the tables in 1999 and proceeded to beat North six times in a row.

"It was amazing, it was like we had grown up overnight pretty much to the point where we went from idolising guys like Carey and Archer and Stevens to just wanting to beat them up, in a sense," Lloyd said.

However, they famously squandered their chance to frank their claims as the best team in 1999 when they lost to Carlton by one point in the preliminary final, and seeing the Kangaroos hoist the premiership cup aloft a week later only served to intensify their bitterness towards the men from Arden Street.

"We thought by the end of that year we were the best side in it. Obviously we let ourselves down in the prelim and I think that probably ramped up a gear for our venom towards North," Lloyd said.

"We came up against each other in the 2000 Ansett Cup grand final at the MCG and I remember Jason Johnson early on knocking out John Blakey with a big hip-and-shoulder, I stood up to Micky Martyn probably for the first time in my life.

"We belted them, we just belted them in that grand final and I think from that point on I thought we had the wood on them."

The Bombers stormed to their 16th premiership later that year but Essendon and North were denied their Ali-Foreman moment and didn't meet in a grand final during that period. Instead, the clubs produced two of the greatest games staged at the MCG in round 17, 1999 and round 16, 2001.

The first of those encounters saw North Melbourne legend Wayne Carey boot 10 goals at one end and the emerging Lloyd seven at the other in a shootout for the ages, which the Bombers won by 26 points.

The second one saw Essendon record the greatest comeback in league history as they recovered from a 69-point deficit to win by 12 points 27.9 (171) to 25.9 (159), in a game that not only produced the equal-most goals in history (52) but also the seventh-most points (330).

Pagan's memories of the first encounter centre around Carey.

"That Wayne Carey banana kick on his left foot," Pagan responded when asked what his memories were of that famous game in 1999. "That was probably the best goal I've seen him kick, he kicked a lot of good goals and I don't remember them all but that one sticks in my mind."

And Lloyd believes he kicked close to the best goal of his career in that same game, when he ran on to a loose ball in the City End pocket and, from mid-air on a tight angle, soccered through at almost post height. "In the context of how big the game was and how far out it was, to soccer one out of midair with a bit of pressure coming from behind, it would have to be right up there," Lloyd said.

Looking back on his personal shootout with Carey, Lloyd said there were shades of the famous day in 1993 when Gary Ablett snr (14) and Paul Salmon (10) booted 24 goals between them in a Geelong-Essendon match – "two guys right on top of their game having a bit of a shootout".

Pagan described the second of those epic encounters as "an amazing game of football" and admitted if he had his time again he would have done 1000 things differently to avoid squandering that 69-point lead.

"If you had have closed it up and put numbers behind the ball after quarter-time, you probably would have closed the game down," Pagan said.

Lloyd booted nine goals in that match and hailed then-captain James Hird's leadership as critical to the Bombers' record fightback.

"At quarter-time James Hird got the group in, we were all pretty glum, but he said, 'Boys, forget about 69 points and let's see if we can get the score down to 35 points by half-time and then I believe we can win the game.' I don't remember too many speeches through my career but that was one I remember. Just amazing leadership to change the focus of the group."