Once they learn to live with the cost and the déja vù, former residents returning to this rarefied environment -- even if their experience was positive -- must accept or ignore many of its aspects that may have rankled when they were kids. Israeli-born real-estate developer Sarit Rozycki ('78) says that when she and her husband decided to leave the city, "we thought, We can't move to Scarsdale -- it's against our religion!" Even after several years there, she still gets queasy when she hears women competing about their kitchens. A classmate of Rozycki's, the Manhattan writer Eric Alterman, remains adamant that he'd never move back, recalling all too vividly seeing a fellow eighth-grader "cry over a B on an algebra exam, worrying that it would hurt his ability to get into Princeton."

There's a large number to whom going back still seems unthinkable -- especially if their parents haven't left (despite the free baby-sitting). It would be the ultimate co-opting -- becoming your parents. When Bingham Ray ('72), a co-president of October Films, moved back East from L.A. in 1992, he opted for the less expensive, more northern Westchester town of Chappaqua (as have many other ex-Scarsdalians). "You have to forge your own path," Ray explains. Even though it was in a Scarsdale High classroom that he first became enamored of art movies after seeing Breathless, and even though he vividly recalls watching Ali MacGraw film scenes for Goodbye Columbus in town, "it didn't seem attractive to me to go back," Ray says. "It didn't make any sense, emotionally or intellectually. I'm not my parents, and I don't have the same ideas and beliefs." (Ray also had hoped to protect his children from Scarsdale's academic pressure cooker -- yet Chappaqua now boasts an even higher average combined SAT score, 1,277 to Scarsdale's 1,233.)

Dan Biederman ('71), the head of several New York City redevelopment districts, also moved to Chappaqua; Biederman says, "It's a nicer prospect to be in a town where you don't constantly encounter people who remember you as a 14-year-old."

Some of those farther removed from the sixties, however, are finding that familiarity comforting. Asked "Why Scarsdale?," they all mention the schools, the public facilities (municipal pool complex, ball fields, and tennis courts), and the short (35-minute) commute. And though most concede Scarsdale's limitations -- unrealistic affluence, warped values, peer pressures -- all have concluded that its known evils are preferable to unknown ones elsewhere. One returnee says his wife, who grew up in a more rural area, "sometimes feels that Scarsdale people are mean or rich or whatever, and I have to tell her that would be true of any suburb. I'm sure if we were in Roslyn or Upper Saddle River, we'd also have professionals who are intense about their children, and bad drivers with expensive cars." All of them (except Philipps) looked at other communities and found them lacking: One woman lived briefly in Montclair but says she "heard about knives and guns at schools"; another contends that Mamaroneck "had racial issues." Pressed for details, both admit they didn't research it that deeply.

Deciding to move back East with their three kids, Paul and Penny Bauersfeld stayed at Paul's parents' while they shopped for a house. "We were looking for something better," says Penny, "and when we couldn't find that, we felt, why leave?" Scarsdale, she says, "just feels like home." Penny's younger sister Kimberly, who lives in Pennsylvania, is only ten years out of high school but says that she and her friends "all talk about moving back to Westchester."

Picking Scarsdale "was a no-brainer," says Lyndon Tretter ('78), a litigator who works near Grand Central. Since arriving two and a half years ago, Tretter has occasionally brought his daughters by the house where he grew up. "I showed them where Susie Hodas stole my ray gun and threw it down the sewer, and talked about how upset I was," Tretter says. "And for them, that's an amazing story, because it's what they're going through nowadays. The pink cement turtle at Heathcote School is still there, and my daughter says, 'I want to play on Daddy's turtle.' It gives you some warmth, because there's a connection."

Tretter's classmate Stephen Nicholas is part of a huge contingent of returnees from the high-school football team. Their fondness for the town is logical: Back in the seventies, they were the local heroes, though football has since been eclipsed by soccer. Nicholas went into his father James's business; he's the team physician for the Jets and Islanders.