Arden Street, Thursday lunch-time. Those still bemoaning the loss of the Lions and the death of community football in Melbourne could do worse than to wander down to watch the Kangaroos train.

The big names who have been headlining this AFL season with a 6-0 scoreline dribble out onto a pristine training surface under a warming sun. The historic grandstands are gone, but there's no doubting the new facilities meet the needs of a modern football club.

A few fans wander in and out of club HQ, passing over paving stones with dedications to granddad and a wall where the glories of days past are proudly displayed. There's not a hint of maroon and gold. There's no Fitzroy here either. North made it through alone.

Last week marked 20 years since Fitzroy and North Melbourne announced formal negotiations for a merger. Geographically a no-brainer, the marriage aimed to take two struggling inner-city clubs and make them a powerful force in the new AFL.

The AFL and Brisbane had other ideas. Not to mention the other league clubs, who – with a Wayne Carey-led North barnstorming to the 1996 premiership – baulked at the notion of the Kangaroos with a list of 50-plus players.

North-Fitzroy, it was feared, could become a super team that would dominate the league for years to come.

The man who was caretaker coach at Fitzroy in 1995 and 1996 is not so sure.

Alan McConnell, who is now the senior assistant coach at GWS, believes there were more issues at play than just list numbers and slotting in one or two of the Lions' best.

"I think the truth is that it is very difficult to judge if they would have become a super team," McConnell says. "History shows that Brisbane 12 months on after the merger with Fitzroy ... the assimilation of the players that they took into their playing ranks didn't prove to be terribly harmonious. You'd be better off talking to others rather than me about how that played out, but from a distance it didn't play out well.

"It certainly caused disharmony there on the back of a pretty successful year the year before ... where one thought that they were on the up, the Bears were on the up."

Indeed there was upheaval for the Brisbane Bears, with the club's stunning run to the 1996 preliminary final – where they lost to North – being followed by an eighth-place finish in 1997 and 16th in 1998.

Only after trading out several players and with the arrival of Leigh Matthew as coach did a super team emerge. By the time of the 2001 premiership, Chris Johnson was the only member of Fitzroy's last team to make it to the MCG on grand final day. But Brisbane had traded shrewdly, even without a list bulked up over 50.

"[Simon] Black arrived on their list as a result of them on-trading [Simon] Hawkings 12 months later," McConnell says. "So they took Simon Hawkings and he played with them for 12 months and then was traded to Sydney and with that pick which was pick 30 something, 30s or 40s, they got Simon Black with that pick.

"And look there were other players who went on to play a bit of footy but it's really around needs ... It's easy to talk in sheer numbers, but there was obviously some talent on Fitzroy's list because a number of players went on to play a lot of footy – Stephen Paxman being one who went to play a lot of football and Rowan Warfe played a lot of footy with Sydney. But neither of those [were picked], they were seen as peripheral to needs by Brisbane because at that time they didn't fit the needs or profile of the players that they were looking for."

Still, the development coach in McConnell concedes that the North Melbourne list was "obviously pretty solid at that stage" meaning any extra men would have added enormous depth.

It's a notion not lost on the man who was Kangaroos coach at the time, Denis Pagan, who led the club to two premierships.

"I wasn't that sure whether I was super keen on it [the merger], but I sort of warmed to it, but look, as soon as it looked like it was all on it, was all over and we just sort of moved on quickly from it," Pagan conceded last week.

"I suppose you don't even think of that at the time. I still remember Kevin Sheedy's words to me when I was assistant in '92 and [he said]: 'It's very hard to win a premiership in the VFL' and in the AFL it is two or three times as hard with interstate teams and that sort of stuff."

Pagan, who struggled to lift Carlton out of the mire, recalls that the 1996 flag "was even sweeter" because the club won the gold AFL centenary cup featuring some of the best leaders in the competition. This is, he says, a key to developing any successful side.

"It just happened [the merger failure] and we just moved on into the next year and we had a pretty good side," Pagan says.

"I suppose we had Wayne Carey who was an out-and-out champion and everyone else was just so even. And they all possessed great leadership skills, you know, to think that you had Carey, [Glenn] Archer, [Anthony] Stevens, [John] Blakey, Robert Scott, Darren Crocker, [Craig] Sholl. And it's probably an indictment for me to say that because you probably miss out on somebody and they could have all been captains or vice-captains in their own right."

Pagan laughs at the prospect of having had a 50-plus list and access to some of Fitzroy's best to coach in 1997 and 1998. "Maybe I could have turned my back and done my shoelaces up ... you know what if coach long enough you might get a couple of weeks when you are in automatic pilot and I think that I might have been in automatic pilot."

There's little doubt North could have used the extra depth in those years as injuries made it difficult for them to defend their premiership, bowing out in the preliminary final in 1997 against St Kilda and then losing the grand final to Adelaide in 1998.

North eventually secured Martin Pike as a solid contributor in the 1999 premiership and Pagan concedes that some of the men in Fitzroy's final team would have benefited from exposure to North's strong playing list.

"It's hard to say which one of those you'd pick," he says. "They were very even then, Fitzroy, in terms of their talent base ... so what did they win in their last year, four or five games? There were some good players there and I'm sure some of them would have been better with better players around them. It's pretty hard to think back now, you think of [those] names and you think 'gee good player', 'yeah good player'. There wasn't a superstar player in that group [though] I don't think."

It's a point conceded by McConnell, who was called into the breach twice as Fitzroy disintegrated and Bernie Quinlan (1995) and Mick Nunan (1996) were sacked as coach.

"No, we had no superstar," McConnell says. "I mean the guys that had all fitted that bill had all left in the two or three years prior to that. [Alastair] Lynch, [Paul] Roos, you know those guys all left – [Paul] Broderick wasn't a superstar, but a very good player – in a three-year window prior to that date.

"I think that's true of Pikey ... he obviously had a good season with us, but played his best footy with, not strong coaching groups, but strong playing lists. There's no doubt that's where he played his best footy. And I think when the playing group lost influence over him at the Kangaroos and he went to Brisbane, again there was a really strong and powerful playing group that managed him very well."

With a young list now in full flight at Greater Western Sydney, McConnell is reluctant to put his experiences at Fitzroy as a defining moment in his career. "I think it all contributes to your experience and your understanding of diversity and situations. It was unbelievably significant at the time and I have memories both good and bad of the experience. Yeah, I think it was influential, but I wouldn't say it was any more or less influential than the rest of the experiences that I've had."

But it taught him one key thing.

"Footy is a business. That's the reason Fitzroy went out of business, because it wasn't able to pay the bills ... it is symptomatic of the fact that if it was just around tribal suburb versus suburb there was a very good reason for why it should have continued to exist, but that's not the environment that we continue to live in today. It is what it is really."

Which leads us back to North Melbourne, where the stand-alone Roos sit comfortable on the top of the ladder with a coach who played in three premierships with the all-powerful Brisbane Lions between 2001 and 2003.

Brad Scott arrived at the newly-merged club from Hawthorn in 1998 and says he had no sense of any difficulties of the club bedding down the merger.

"To be honest I actually thought they were already Lions players, Chris Johnson, Jarrod Molloy, they were Brisbane Lions players when I got there – they were already pretty entrenched," Scott says.

And the Kangaroos? Did they miss an opportunity for a super team in 1997, or is the club comfortable planning the super teams of the future?

"I think that the club solidified themselves as North Melbourne and it's still one of the only community clubs in the AFL and people no longer talk about whether North Melbourne is going to survive or not but they talk about North Melbourne thriving," Scott says.

"I think the previous administration and the current administration should take a lot of credit for that."