They ruled the roost.

Of course they did. They were the North Ballarat Roosters, a Victorian regional club respected throughout the league for its professionalism and its people.

Former Williamstown general manager Brendan Curry used to call them “The Good Guys’’, despite the Roosters regularly beating the Towners.

When Sandringham won the 2006 VFL grand final to claim its third consecutive premiership, North Ballarat coach Gerard FitzGerald led the tributes to the Zebras and their coach, Mark Williams.

GOLD STANDARD: THE STORY BEHIND BENDIGO’S VFL DEMISE

FitzGerald, “Fitz’’ to everyone in the league, and Williams, whose head turned to “Wilbur’’, were close, and Fitzgerald said his coaching counterpart had done a fabulous job and it would be a long time before another club would win three in a row.

For once, he was wrong.

FitzGerald’s Roosters replicated “Wilbur’s” Zebras when they won the 2008-09-10 flags at Docklands stadium.

It was triumph three times over for a powerful country club that took the plunge and entered the state league in 1996, with former top AFL Bomber Alan Ezard as coach.

Three years later it was playing off in the grand final. And 12 months later it was there again, meeting Sandringham in 2000 in the last match staged at Waverley Park.

Coached by FitzGerald, the Roosters lost both grand finals. But some great times were ahead for him and North Ballarat after going into a part-alignment with AFL club North Melbourne.

They weren’t to last. At the end of 2017, the Roosters were booted out of the VFL over governance issues and board differences that had been simmering away for some time.

“It still grinds my gears a little bit, the way it finished up and how we don’t have a VFL team in this beautiful city,’’ the Roosters’ last VFL captain, Luke Kiel, says.

He says it’s a shame there’s no regional pathway for talented young footballers aspiring to play at the highest levels.

Curry’s appointment as general manager of Williamstown coincided with North Ballarat’s first season in the VFL and he became one of its greatest admirers.

He says he was shocked when the Roosters lost their licence.

“To be honest, I was flabbergasted,’’ Curry says. “To me, they had a winning formula. I don’t think they were overly liked in the Ballarat community — that might have been pure jealousy from the other clubs — but they were producing players for the AFL and they were successful.

*****

When North Ballarat lost to Sandringham in the final round of 2017, a sorry season ended for the club. It turned out an era did too.

The Roosters, coached by triple premiership player and FitzGerald disciple Marc Greig, finished on the bottom of a 14-team ladder with a 1-17 record.

They had scraped together three wins the previous season.

By then their part-alignment with North Melbourne was over.

The Roosters-Roos combination had been wonderfully successful across eight years but at the end of 2015 North Melbourne decided to send all its surplus players to Werribee.

Around the same time, the North Ballarat board had shifted towards supporting the local club, North Ballarat City, which had been established in 2006.

Club insiders spoke of seeing resources taken away and inevitably weakening the VFL program.

Midway through the 2015 season the board decided not to reappoint FitzGerald, who in two tenures had established a handsome reputation in Victorian coaching circles.

Amid repeated comments from the club that it wanted to “go in a different direction’’, he left the Roosters with the record of having coached the most games — 345 — in VFA/VFL history.

On the eve of the 2017 season, North Ballarat’s popular and long-serving football manager Marg Richards was made redundant.

She had been with the club in various roles since November, 1995.

At VFL headquarters, officials wondered if the Roosters were being run into the ground by an administration that resented putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to play in the VFL.

During the 2017 season, one North Ballarat official remarked to a Casey official that the VFL was a “bottomless pit of money’’.

In September, AFL Victoria announced it would be revoking North Ballarat’s licence.

CEO Steve Reaper said AFL Victoria needed to ensure there was a sustainable team in Ballarat and one representative of the region and “fully focused on a state-league presence’’.

“A recent football review at the club indicated issues with the current governance structure in place to support the VFL program, given it also had a focus at community level with North (Ballarat) City playing in the local Ballarat competition,’’ Reaper said.

When it was put to another AFL Victoria official that it was disappointing to see North Ballarat go, he replied: “Don’t be too sorry for them. I think they got what they wanted.’’

But the club issued a statement saying it was “extremely disappointed and frustrated’’ by the decision.

It was a “huge injustice to the club, but more so to the thousands of people involved including the players, members, officials, coaches and parents – all of whom give so much to our club and are the lifeblood of football in our region’’.

The Roosters vowed to “work tirelessly to have a team that represents Ballarat and the Greater Western region back in the VFL and build a club that is bigger, better and stronger than ever’’.

But, unlike Frankston, which had lost its licence at the end of 2016, North Ballarat did not reapply for a return.

Hearts sank for Greig, one of the club’s greatest players across 209 games. Like many Roosters, he had graduated from the North Ballarat Rebels in the TAC Cup.

As he called one of North Ballarat’s grand finals, former Fitzroy and Adelaide coach Robert Shaw remarked that Greig “wears a big pair of shorts, but he can play football’’.

He was called on to replace FitzGerald at a time when board members were losing hope and heart in the VFL. People who had pushed Greig up for the job later regretted doing so.

“We were under-resourced,’’ Kiel says.

Kiel was what FitzGerald calls a “classic’’ North Ballarat VFL player. He was from Swan Hill and the Roosters’ recruiting contacts recommended him as a player worth chasing up. Trying to get a list position, he drove three-and-a-half hours twice a week for four months. After landing a contract he relocated to Ballarat, started an apprenticeship, became a top VFL player and wasn’t short of being AFL material.

After the Roosters’ licence was pulled, Kiel and a string of other players went to other VFL clubs. The skipper and two-time best and fairest transferred to Geelong and is now back in the Ballarat league, at age 34 playing for Sebastopol under another former North Ballarat player, Tony Lockyer.

Greig was not long out of a job. He again replaced FitzGerald, this time at the Greater Western Victoria Rebels, taking on a full-time role as regional coaching director for 2018. FitzGerald had been the Rebels’ part-time coach for two seasons.

*****

For all the frustration and disappointment of the final two years, the Roosters’ achievements under the leadership of Gerard FitzGerald and captain Shaun “Spider’’ Moloney remain a source of immense satisfaction for players, officials and supporters.

For FitzGerald, the hat-trick of flags squared the ledger on grand final defeats in 1999 and 2000 and again with Port Melbourne in 2004 (strangely, he wasn’t reappointed after one season with the Borough).

“The older I get, the more pride you have in it, because you’ve got to get everything right,’’ he says. “They’re so hard to win.’’

Moloney says he and his teammates believed no side could hang in longer than them.

“We had blokes who really, really cared,’’ he says.

“So when we’d come up against a side, we thought they’d give in first. That was our whole thing – ‘Hang in there, because it cannot possibly mean as much to them, so stick at it and they will drop away’. Make no mistake, the Kangaroo boys were the cream on top of the cake.’’

Case in point: just before three-quarter time in the 2008 grand final, Gavin Urquhart picked up the ball, ran to 50m and booted the goal to put the Roosters 18 points up on Port. Moloney thought it was “game over’’.

Richards has always believed the appointment of Moloney as captain was a turning point for the club.

It came at a time when the culture was “shocking’’, she says.

Moloney, a rangy fullback and a fierce competitor, was in Switzerland when chairman Peter Wilson phoned to say he wanted him to be skipper going into the 2006 season.

He held the position until his retirement after the 2010 premiership.

“That was the biggest change I saw in my time at the club,’’ Richards says.

“The minute he came back in the door, the entire culture shifted. You wouldn’t have believed it was the same club. The changes were unbelievable. It was an amazing difference.’’

Moloney says he and the leadership group would not tolerate any nonsense. If players weren’t committed or well behaved, they were out of the club.

“We just said, ‘We need to have people here we can trust and we can go to war with’,’’ he says.

The Roosters played through to the preliminary final in Moloney’s second year as captain.

In the elimination final, North Ballarat produced one of football’s great turnarounds: after falling 59 points behind in the third quarter, it kicked 17 of the next 19 goals to win by 37 points at North Port Oval.

The Roosters were premiers in the next three seasons, defeating the Gary Ayres-coached Port Melbourne in the 2008 grand final and the Northern Bullants in 2009 and again in 2010.

All matches were played under the roof of the Docklands stadium, giving a level of comfort that stood in contrast to some home games in the Ballarat elements.

Far from relying on the Kangaroos, North Ballarat had top-line players of its own, including Myles Sewell, Steve Clifton, Orren Stephenson, Michael Searl, Brett Goodes, Jacob Spolding, Greig and Moloney.

Richards remembers small things about each of the flags: Greig beating a report to play in 2008, the players paying for a small plane to fly head of fitness Stephen “Abba’’ Abbruzzese back to Melbourne from a wedding at Warrnambool in 2009 and FitzGerald having a rare blow-up in the box when champion big man Stephenson ducked down the rooms to get stitched up, leaving the Roosters scrambling to have a ruckman at a centre bounce in 2010.

“He actually got up and shoved his chair out of the way,’’ she says. “He was fuming, ‘Fitzy’. He was absolutely furious.’’

FitzGerald, Moloney and Richards all say the North Melbourne players were outstanding for North Ballarat.

Ahead of two finals series, Kangaroos forward Corey Jones hired a bus and drove his teammates up the highway for training. No one asked him to; he did it off his own bat.

“They blended in really well with our culture,’’ Richards says.

“They just fitted in. They were never treated like they were any different. They were part of the club and they were part of the team.’’

Moloney says Kangaroos Eddie Sainsbury “was running the show’’.

“I’d speak to Eddie and say, ‘Righto, this is what we’re trying to do this weekend’. And he’d say, ‘Righto, Spider, you leave the boys to me,’’ he recalls.

“He’d make sure the Kangaroo boys were on like song.’’

What made it work, Moloney says, it that both groups of players “genuinely’’ enjoyed each other’s company.

Unlike with other alignments, the Kangaroos never put demands on where their contingent should play.

Every season they also assigned a development coach to the Roosters; John Lamont, Cameron Joyce and Jason Lappin were among those assistants to fill the role.

FitzGerald saw that North Melbourne was “totally invested’’ in the alignment and the development of its young players.

He visited Arden St from time to time and was always made to feel welcome.

When he returned to North Ballarat, FitzGerald told everyone that the Kangaroos were an outstanding football club. He got on particularly well with coach Brad Scott.

“I knew we needed to get that partnership between North Ballarat and North Melbourne right,’’ FitzGerald says.

“I proudly look back on those days and think how good it was. We had a partnership that I called a relationship. We realised that by working well together we could achieve some good outcomes. From our end we were getting intellectual property you would not get unless you had trust from your AFL partner. We could get access to North Melbourne’s thinking about where the game was at that particular moment.’’

Moloney was then and is now an ardent admirer of FitzGerald, who often described himself as a “process-driven’’ coach and who is now living on the surf coast after selling the family farm in the western district.

“His influence was significant, can never be underestimated,’’ Moloney says.

Richards calls him a “people person’’.

“He genuinely cared about the players and what they were doing away from football. He was very focused when he was coaching. He didn’t yell. He was a teacher. He was very calm,’’ she says.

That care extended to the staff. He always went out of his way to talk to and support the university students and volunteers who worked under Richards.

“To him, they weren’t someone who just showed up to strap a few ankles and run a bit of water. He knew who they were and what they were doing,’’ Richards says.

Long-serving Willy GM Curry took to FitzGerald’s affable manner – and accepted his many offers of a handshake.

“I struck up a chord with ‘Fitzy’ and the people there at North Ballarat, because they were so nice,’’ he says.

“He’d always say, ‘What a great honour it is to be playing against a club with such history’. It would be Williamstown this, Williamstown that. We called them the good guys. We’d go in after a game and hear what a great honour it was to get beaten again!’’

Richards is still around North Ballarat. In fact, she works for the local council and manages MARS Stadium.

Moloney is involved too, with his youngest son playing under-football for North. Despite his regrets about the Roosters no longer being in the VFL, he says he “loves the club’’.

“I’ve got black and white running through my veins,’’ he says.

“Any club is always bigger than individual politics, isn’t it?’’