When you consider great sporting dynasties, Liverpool's dominance in the late seventies and eighties and Manchester United's glorious era under Sir Alex Ferguson spring to mind.
But the success story of Leeds Rhinos – eight Super League titles, two Challenge Cups and three World Club Challenge wins in the past 14 years – is no less impressive.
So much so that a film has been made chronicling their golden era since the switch to summer rugby in 1996, culminating in the memorable 2015 treble-winning campaign.
As Good As It Gets? is a terrific production that will appeal to all rugby league fans and sports lovers in general.
It focuses largely on the treble season and the sub-plots surrounding departing legends Kevin Sinfield, Jamie Peacock and Kylie Leluai.
Their anecdotal recollections of the season in searingly honest interviews reveal the journey the players and coach Brian McDermott went on during a tumultuous campaign which marked them out as arguably the best team of the Super League era.
Club captain Sinfield tells of how being dropped by McDermott during the season affected him, Peacock reveals the pain barrier he played through to help his hometown club get to Old Trafford and Leuluai recounts playing with a heart defect.
Club legends Danny McGuire and Rob Burrow also talk at length, with the latter revealing how he was left devastated after McDermott told him he longer saw him as worthy of a starting place.
“I was starting to think about looking for another job away from rugby league,” says Burrow, who turned down the chance to join Wigan.
Directed by Lee Hicken, the film premiered at Everyman Leeds cinema on Monday and is narrated by Harry Potter actor and Rhinos fanatic Matthew Lewis.
It begins with historical footage of northern England, accompanied by The Enemy’s We Live And Die In These Towns, which sets the tone perfectly to focus on rugby league and Leeds Rhinos in particular.
Archive footage is shown of arguably the most pivotal moment in the club’s recent history – the takeover by Gary Hetherington and Paul Caddick in 1996.
At the end of the first season of summer rugby, Leeds were a failing club at every level and debts had spiralled to over £5million.
They finished two places above relegated Workington Town.
Then salvation arrived in the shape of Hetherington, fresh from his success with Sheffield Eagles, and wealthy businessman Caddick.
Hetherington recalled: “Leeds Rhinos were extremely close to going out of business and there was nobody in the city who stepped forward to save them.
“It needed two Castleford lads in Paul Caddick and I to come in and get energised by the challenge.
“In 1998, Leeds reached the Grand Final and in 1999 we went to Wembley and won the Challenge Cup, so we turned things round pretty quickly.
“After that, we started developing and introducing younger players into the squad.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Under Tony Smith, the Rhinos won their first championship in 32 years when defeating Bradford Bulls in the 2004 Grand Final.
The homegrown core of the side stayed together for many years and provided the bedrock of the club’s success.
Jamie Jones-Buchanan, the only member of the 2004 side still playing for Leeds, co-produced the film and features heavily in it.
He talks of his close friendship with Sinfield and how playing for his hometown club marked the realisation of a dream.
“I’m just a kid from Bramley who grew up supporting Leeds from the South Stand,” he says.
Peacock’s story is similar, albeit via a spell at Bradford, and the film also includes telling insights into Zak Hardaker’s life after he joined the Rhinos from Featherstone Rovers.
Hardaker tells of his off-field troubles and how one alcohol-fuelled night out in Leeds landed him with a black eye and saw him axed from Steve McNamara’s England squad.
Hardaker admits he lied to team-mates and McNamara about how he sustained the facial injury and says how he would sometimes get home from a night out at 4am before Burrow came to his house to pick him up for training two and a half hours later.
The film ends with Leeds’ win over Wigan in the 2015 Grand Final and also contains plenty of compelling and often humorous anecdotes from McDermott, who oversaw the treble success.
Peacock and McGuire describe the elation when Ryan Hall’s dramatic late matchwinning try at Huddersfield sealed the League Leaders’ Shield.
As Good As It Gets?, which lasts around 90 minutes and follows Hicken’s Leeds United film Do You Want To Win?, is currently selling out cinemas and has now been picked up by Amazon Prime.
Hicken, a Leeds lad and ardent Rhinos supporter, said: “We didn’t want to make a rugby league film – we wanted to make a good film that was about rugby league.
“I think we’ve managed to create something that’s really special for audiences, both in the UK and beyond.”
The film's title comes from a phrase used by McDermott when talking to his players - "I said to them this might be as good as it gets" - but of course Leeds claimed a further championship last year.
The film chronicles only to the end of the treble-winning campaign in 2015 but Hicken added: “If we ever wanted to re-edit the film to include 2017 or whatever happens after that, we could do that as well.”
