It has been 103 years since the North Sydney Bears won the NSWRL premiership.

Now, supporters of the club and others sympathetic to the cause, have just the final details needing ironing out before they can celebrate the return of North Sydney to the top tier of rugby league in Australia.

With an in-principle agreement in place between the Western Australian Government and the ARLC, and barring a stumbling block in the short term, the time for one of the games foundation clubs’ return appears to be on our doorstep and frankly, despite constant hope from people bleeding the colours, it looked a forlorn endeavour at times.

It is a monumental moment.

A few seasons back I attended a number of Bears home matches at North Sydney Oval with a former reserve grade player at the club. David Toon played gallantly for the red and blacks without ever hitting the heights of first grade.

He told me story after story of the great Mark Graham, the legend of Fred Teasdale and what the Bears meant to so many people across the northern side of Sydney Harbour.

Sadly for Norths, the demographics of Sydney changed immensely and briskly in the 1990s.

With an expanded NRL being clearly over-crowded in the city centre, something had to give. Souths gave for a while but George Piggins, Ray Martin and Andrew Denton and other stubborn Souths diehards to rile up passion and demand a seat at the NRL table.

A blast from the past: North Sydney’s 1983 team.

Sadly, aside from the late Mike Gibson and plenty of passionate people in the vox pop, Norths lacked the star power to stay afloat and I can still remember the strange feeling of starting the 2000 season without them. And let’s never forget the mirage that was their quasi-presence in the Northern Eagles of 2000 to 2002.

Being a Canterbury-Bankstown fan I was annoyed when Toon told me that the trip to Belmore was the one the Bears hated the most. Equally, North Sydney’s rivalry with Manly back in the day had made me seethe as a working class kid from the west.

Yet as I listened more and more to Toon over recent years and saw Bears folk still handing out flyers and calling for re-entry to the competition, a more mature understanding of what rugby league is actually sustained by became clear.

Mario Fenech with North Sydney teammate Sean Hoppe in 1993. (Photo by Getty Images)

The Super League era proved to be a death knell for numerous clubs in the end, with amalgamations, disintegrations and short lived lives seeing many a club on both sides of the war failing to survive. It was a cheap and horrible time which was undoubtedly won by the newer competition that brought plenty of positives into the fully professional era of the game.

However, the one thing it failed to do, was adequately recognise, acknowledge and respect the people that had played a role in building the game into the powerhouse it had become by the 1990s.

While the chaos of that time saw the Tigers, Magpies, Dragons and Steelers live to fight another day, the Mariners, Reds and Rams disappeared never to be seen again. Sadly, after all the reshuffling, the Bears were jettisoned at the end of the 1999 season, despite having been involved in finals play for the five years prior under Peter Louis.

Conservative estimates suggest the game took at least a 10-year hit, with others suggesting that current board issues at Wests Tigers show that the ramifications of the war might still linger to this day.

Friendships were burned, badly at times and key administrators such as Ken Arthurson, Peter Moore and John Quayle lived lives of constant stress, as John Ribot and his financial backers sought to ‘steal’ the game away from those that had fundamentally built it.

Joseph Suaalii playing for the Bears. (Photo by Mark Evans/Getty Images)

The Bears were the biggest losers of the entire saga and calmly and quietly have sought to navigate a way back to the top tier.

Success in the lower ones has come, feeder arrangements have also kept them relevant in the top grade and how ironic it would be to see the red and black return as an NRL entity in one of the cities that was earmarked to replace them in the Super League plan.

In the ’90s, players needed a clearer sense of security, better pay and conditions and a game that set them up for something tangible after their playing days. Super League promoted and brought that to them. Yet in the process, killed off one of the foundation clubs that had done little to deserve expulsion.

In retrospect and now confirmed by the ARLC’s agreement with the Western Australian government, the game has now made right what many have cited as injustice for years.

The Dolphins are here, PNG will not be too far behind, maybe even the Jets’ brand will be back in the top flight one day. But for know, the pleasure of having the Bears back in the fray is emotional and brilliant.

People young enough to not remember them are in for a treat.