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On Sunday, on a windy day in the Apple Isle, Brent Harvey, shortly to turn 38, kicked six goals as North Melbourne edged past Melbourne.

It was Boomer’s first bag of five or more goals in 6,498 days (or more than 17 years). In 1998, the year of his last five-goal game (and when John Howard was in his first term as PM), that feat was achieved 138 times across the league.

Last season, it happened just just 67 times.

Five-goal hauls peaked well above the 150-mark in the early to mid-1990s and have basically declined ever since.

When Boomer first made his debut in 1996, the AFL was full of all-time great full-forwards. We’re talking Gary Ablett Sr, Tony Lockett and Jason Dunstall.

But interestingly as the below graph shows, it wasn’t just the big names kicking bags of goals. During the first half of the 1990s, there was also a peak in the number of different players kicking five goals or more.

Take 1991 for example. We had 73 different players kick five goals or more (remember, it happened only 67 times in total in 2015) and we saw 174 bags that year.

We had names such as Brad Hardie (two), Dale Lewis (one) and Terry Keays (two) pop up, along with obvious ones in Peter Sumich (13), John Longmire (nine), Dunstall (eight) and Allen Jakovich (eight).

Even rarer even nowadays is the 10-goal bag. As we can see from the graph below, this also peaked in the early to mid 90s but has basically flatlined in recent years.

Since 2000 there have been 17 10-goal bags across the competition (three of them from West Coast’s Josh Kennedy). In 1993 alone we had 16.

Interestingly, even though the amount of bags kicked in games has been declining since the mid-1990s, goals per game have remained relatively stable.

So what is going on? With all the talk about how modern rules advantage forwards, we don’t see as many running riot.

Everyone bemoaned the fact the the game became less free flowing (before this year’s rule changes) but we didn’t really see a decline in total goals per game.

So what are footy fans missing out on? Quite simply, bags.