"I never missed a step moving in," he says, pointing out that despite years away attending Harvard and medical school and living in the city, he never bothered to change his driver's license from his parents' address until he moved back: "I've always considered Scarsdale home." He adds, "I was exposed to good things; there's no reason to run away from them." Nicholas jokes that the real reason he returned is that "the football team was so bad, we had to move back and repopulate the team, bring it back up."

Parenthood made others see the world -- and Scarsdale -- differently. "When I left for college, there was no way in my mind I was gonna move back here -- I was gonna take on the world," says Tom Reno, 36, who works in public relations and married a fellow Scarsdale graduate he met during a summer break from college. Before returning, they lived in Ohio, Manhattan, and Florida. "But when I had children," Reno says, "it started to affect my thought process. On visits home to my parents, you start to make comparisons. I was a suburbanite, and have suburban attitudes about raising kids. Like after coming home, the kid can go back to school and play with his friends. It captures a bit of the fifties lifestyle. Scarsdale's not Mayberry, but it's still a small town; you get to know your neighbors." Some nights, Reno walks by his old house and hallucinates: "I'm almost like a kid again, like my mom'll be there, she'll have some food, I'll go watch television -- that whole Leave It to Beaver thing."

Mayberry, Beaver -- these are the touchstones of the Nick at Nite generation. Instead of rebelling against their parents, they're feeling a Wonder Years nostalgia for their carefree youth, trying to re-create a safe haven in less-safe times.

And though times are prosperous, their families' upward mobility may have peaked with their parents. "Having grown up in Scarsdale, a lot of these people can never top what their parents did," says Audrey Pierot ('80), who moved back with twin daughters after a divorce, with the help of money inherited after her father died. "The ones who succeeded came back and are more appreciative of what they had growing up. We thought everyone lived the way we did. I got a Mercedes when I graduated from high school; it's hard for me to top that."

Even though Lyndon Tretter became a lawyer like his father, he says he has found that "you have to work that much harder to keep in place -- not even in place, because I don't have as nice a house as my parents did. I am very jealous of the people who bought my parents' house. I could never afford to buy the house I grew up in, and that kills me."

The lingering question is whether the Scarsdale they've bought back into is still the place they remember -- and whether it's possible, with all the changes in society of the last several decades, to experience it the same way.

Physically, it hasn't changed that much, though the houses are getting bigger and closer together, and the schools are that much older. Academically, the quality remains high, even though most of the teachers who taught these returnees will have retired by the time the returnees' kids reach the same grades. Demographically, the biggest change is the influx of international businessmen and diplomats.

But the lifestyles are definitely in flux. The divorce rate seems lower than during their parents' swinging seventies -- though it might just be too soon to tell. Most of the men say they work longer hours than their fathers did; many more women are working, at least part-time, to pay the bills. This has led to a shortage of volunteers for village organizations, sports, and after-school activities, which are the backbone of the community.