As they approached the bar at the Clyde Hotel on the Cardigan Street corner on Saturday afternoon and each ordered a beer, they declared victory: a drink in 476 Melbourne pubs.

That was every Melbourne pub listed in the Yellow Pages in 1983, excluding a few in the very far-flung areas, which they finally ruled outside their feasible thirst or reach.

It all began when four friends who had attended teachers' college together in 1980, meeting every Saturday night at The Clyde, figured out an exotic way of staying in touch as their post-student lives diverged.

Stuart McArthur, by then teaching, came up with the idea of a pub crawl to end all pub crawls.

Supervising a school exam, he thumped a Yellow Pages on his desk and set to listing all the hotels of Melbourne.

On October 15, 1983, he and friends Mick Stephens, Llewella Bates and Tim Dorgan trooped into the Cricketers Arms in Cruikshank Street, Port Melbourne, and each ordered a 7-ounce glass of beer. Their quest for a certain form of immortality had begun.

They had rules. Just one glass in each hotel. A pub was only a pub if it had a bottle shop – every hotel worth the name had one in those days – and it had to provide seating inside for drinkers. Private clubs were ruled out.

Notes had to be taken, so the pub would be remembered forever, and bar staff had to sign, proving drink had been taken. Stuart McArthur still has his official book. It runs to 70 pages.

An entry from the Windsor Hotel in Spring Street begins "narrowly avoided a crisis here".  Mick had left his record book on a tram. He caught a cab to the tram depot and found his treasure.

One small beer might sound abstemious. In fact, this little group was very dedicated. Up to 22 pubs were visited on a single Saturday, with dinner invariably a parmigiana. There weren't many gastro-pubs around those days.

The three men found themselves refused a drink at the Kingston in Richmond. It was a lesbian establishment and things looked grim until a bar staffer playing pool berated her colleagues for "being too paranoid". The drinking book was signed. Once, a hotelier refused to sign, suspecting tax inspectors had arrived. His wife talked him around.

As the years blurred by, hotels that had been listed in 1983 closed. No matter. If the closed hostelry had met the criteria in 1983, the four friends would stand on the footpath outside and drink a stubby, carefully noting the occasion.

Their crawl took them by tram throughout the inner city and suburbs, and then moved to taking trains to the establishments of surburbia proper until they were taking taxis around the outer ring of Melbourne.

"It just got progressively harder," said Stuart. Life was getting in the way. "Tim dropped out after 195 pubs, and Llewella gave up after 350. But Mick and I kept going and got to 468."

That was 1989. They were eight pubs short of their goal. The group drifted apart, and Stuart's records lay forgotten. For 26 years.

A couple of months ago, Stuart's son told him he was going on a pub crawl  – an evening that might have involved two or three hotels.

"That's not a pub crawl," said Stuart. He retrieved his book and flicked through 70 pages of proper pub crawling, astonishing his son.

Stuart remembered there remained eight pubs unvisited. All in Carlton. From the beginning  the friends had planned to march triumphantly through Carlton, taking a drink at those last eight hotels, and to declare mission accomplished at The Clyde.

He contacted his old friends and they agreed. It must happen. A Facebook page was created: Unfinished Business Pub Crawl.

And so, on Saturday, four old friends, accompanied by a trail of supporters, completed their epic crawl, calling for beers at The Great Northern, The Kent, The Brandon, The Dan O'Connell, The Beaufort, the Shaw Davey Slum (known as Stewarts in 1983), the Astor and yes, finally, The Clyde.

Stuart denies he's obsessive. Instead, he refers to a personal philosophy: you have to honour the idea.

"We had an idea, and we're finally honouring it. Even a stupid idea has to be honoured," he said.