They’re baaaack. Home buyers go where they swear they never would.

The median sales price for a single-family home in the city of Boston hit $885,500 in July, according to a report the Greater Boston Association of Realtors released Aug. 16. After all, this is a city where a parking space practically requires a mortgage. (How can we forget the Boston condo sellers who were offered $750,000 for one of their valet parking spots back in February?)

Meanwhile, prices farther out, while certainly not cheap, aren’t nearly as staggering. The median sale price for a single-family home in Worcester County was $445,000 in July, according to The Warren Group, a data analytics firm. For condos, it was $335,000. At the very least, it’s possible to get more space and yard for your money. Maybe even someplace to park, too, and some baby-sitting help from grandparents.

But what’s the emotional cost of returning to the past? Can a bigger bathroom make up for running into your prom date at the deli? The answer, it seems, is yes.

Mark Dunn and his husband, Daniel Castaldy, were fed up with apartment life. The year was 2018. The place: Quincy. The mood? Cautiously optimistic.

“We were renting. We looked at each other and said: ‘We’re wasting our money. We need to find a house or condo. It will be easy,’” Dunn recalled. He’s a photographer; Castaldy works for Facebook in Cambridge. Surely two people with solid incomes and a healthy sense of perspective can find a home. Right?

Spoiler alert: “We couldn’t find anything,” Dunn said. “All we wanted was a house with a yard. Was that too much to ask for?”

After striking out in Quincy, the couple adjusted their expectations.

“We thought, ‘Now, let’s just look for houses on a train line. Scituate, even! Even though it would have taken Daniel two hours to get to Cambridge. It was cheaper then,” Dunn said. “We looked in Reading. Twenty minutes out! Why was it so expensive for a small house?”

By October 2019, after being outbid on an asbestos-ridden home in Weymouth, the couple decided to tour a ranch-style abode in Sharon, where the median sales price for a single-family home was $750,000 in July, according to The Warren Group report. Dunn was hesitant; he grew up in nearby Norton. Did he really want to move just miles from his hometown? “I thought: I don’t want to go back there. I’ll see everyone I know,” he recalled.

Desperation won the day.

The home also had shag rugs, cracked ceilings, and unfortunate shrubbery.

“The siding needed work. There were ugly bushes that looked like a bank — one long line. It was ′70s. All ′70s. Outdated,” he said.

They went inside anyway, and Dunn was immediately hit with déjà vu. He’d been in the house before. He just knew it, shag rug and all. Suddenly, an older lady — the homeowner, whom he didn’t expect to be on the scene — approached him.

“She’s talking, talking, talking. And I’m like: ‘This is so familiar. Why is this so familiar?’ I told her I was from Norton, and she asked, ‘Do you know my granddaughter?’ She was literally my best friend growing up. I used to go to this house as a kid,” said Dunn, now 35.

And so the couple bought and remodeled the house (for $400,000, not including the renovation loan), and now they have parties around the same in-ground pool where he frolicked as a teen. They’re usually joined by high school pals who’ve returned to the area.

“Everyone has moved home,” Dunn said. “It’s weird. I went to this pool growing up, and now we’re reliving it. We love it so much. It’s not weird anymore. Now I see why people move into these towns as I’m getting older, with the cute quintessential corner stores and the convenience. I have a backyard, a driveway, and a pool.”

Ariel Frey-Vogel and her husband, Brian Vogel, both physicians, are equally enchanted with Acton, where they went to high school and where the median sales price was $845,000 in July, according to The Warren Group. The pair (who did not date as teens) were committed to city life until spatial constraints with two young kids became an issue. They started out in Dorchester, then squeezed into a Winchester condo, then bought a single-family in Acton in 2021, close to both sets of grandparents. They commute to Boston, and being so close to family is a big help.

She sees familiar faces from her teen years, but that’s OK.

“I’m a person who tends to be nervous seeing people from school whom I didn’t know that well. It turned out to be fine. We recognize, ‘Oh, we’ve both grown up!’ All of the cliques from high school are not a big deal,” she said.

Kristin Hilberg, an agent with Keller Williams who specializes in Acton, Boxborough, and Littleton, said her buyer pool is young families moving out of the city to raise their kids. “That’s the number-one group: either first-time buyers coming out of rentals or move-up buyers. They bought their condo in Charlestown, have babies, and decide to move. In Littleton, you get a four-bedroom Colonial with three bathrooms. You get land and space.”

Space was the major issue for Brad Hawes, an Arlington dad of two who’s planning to spread out back home in Natick after selling his Arlington Cape, where he and his wife, Liz, have lived for 13 years.

“The biggest thing is, we’re running out of room in our house with two kids in a smaller three-bedroom. We could live here, but ideally, our dream house would be bigger with a bigger yard. Growing up in Natick, I had a nice, private backyard. I think of a backyard as a sanctuary and an oasis,” Hawes said wistfully.

He doesn’t feel funny about returning home, either.

“At this point, most of my college friends from Tufts have also moved to their hometowns,” he said.

Kate Shiebler was less sanguine about moving home to Winchendon, which she fled from in 2004.

“Starting at age 10, I knew I wanted to get out, which is very funny now,” Shiebler said.

After living in and around Boston, though, she realized how much she missed green space. The family originally tried a fixer-upper in Gardner, but it needed more fixing than they could tolerate. Then they found their dream home: four bedrooms, lots of land, surrounded by forest … just five minutes from her mother.

“My mother thinks it’s hilarious. She loves to tell everyone how I said, ‘You’ll see the last of me,’” Shiebler said, laughing. “I’m still friendly with a lot of the people I grew up with, and a lot of us are in the same boat. We all said we’d be getting the hell out. We all have the same stories. We realized what we could get in Winchendon.”

Alissa Weiss, who recently returned to the hometown she loved, Harvard, sums it up best.

“You keep on looking for the perfect town, then you realize you came from it,” she said.

Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @kcbaskin.