SIR PIZZA | PHOTO BY SEAN COLLIER

I grew up in Ross Township, but that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

Ross is a geographically large municipality, with three major roads — McKnight, Babcock and a good chunk of I-279 — winding through it. (Two of those roads are simultaneously Route 19, but let’s not get sidetracked.) It stretches beyond Ross Park Mall in the North, nearly bisects Bellevue in the South, has West View carved out of its belly and makes it almost to Millvale on one side.

I’m passingly familiar with most of that territory, but there are certainly roads in Ross I’ve never traveled. So no — “I’m from Ross” isn’t quite adequate.

I’m from the specific sliver of Ross Township near the Mount Nebo exit of 279, which skirts around the western edge of West View. It’s a micro-area where it seems like every road runs along the bottom of a tree-covered hill — and not a single run proceeds in anything even resembling a straight line.

Call it Neboland. (Better name than Babcockville.)

On Monday, I returned to this very specific sliver of Allegheny County to meet some high-school friends at Sir Pizza — a primary landmark of greater Neboland. If you’re a Verizon customer, you’ll recall that Monday featured a massive, hours-long service outage. This was of no consequence to my journey; while I’m incapable of retaining even basic knowledge of new landmarks, the impossibly curvy roads in this area are so etched in my brain that my hands begin turning before I even think about which side of the bizarre intersection has the stop sign.

On arrival, too, I experienced an overwhelming hit of sense memory. Can I tell you what my office smells like? Or my backyard? No. If you say “Sir Pizza smell,” however, I’m flooded with memories of crumbled pepperoni and one of those Pac-Man machines that was encased in a tabletop.

While consuming a good 75% of a pepperoni pizza myself — it’s quite good, by the way — and catching up with friends, I noticed a certain mental calm that can only come from a very sturdy sense of place. I’ve lived on one edge or another of the Hilltop for almost a decade now, but I can’t feel my way around it like I can effortlessly navigate my old end of Ross Township. Even though I’d rather live here now, a sort of settling clarity sinks in when I’m in the very specific area where I grew up.

I immediately felt silly for every time I’ve caught up with high school friends anywhere else. However and wherever you can meet up with folks from the past, it’s worth doing, but there’s something uniquely resonant about getting folks back together in spaces you shared a quarter-century ago. It’s good for your comfort with one another and yourself; old rhythms return, forgotten jokes come back.

None of the three of us live in that area anymore; I’m in the city, another is in Etna, a third is in Los Angeles (which I’m told bears very little resemblance to Ross Township). This reunion, then, was a proper homecoming — the kind that can’t be achieved if you still live where you grew up and is equally impossible if you try to replicate it with the people but not the place.

And it’s homecoming season, after all. This weekend, or sometime soon, get a few folks together and go back to the old haunt — or at least the old street. It’ll be worth it. And you’ll get there without having to turn on your GPS.