You might call the recent victory of a loose coalition of northwest Altadena homeowners over rich, powerful and lawyered-up Polytechnic School a David and Goliath story.

But there might be some confusion about who’s the little guy and who’s the big one if you’ve never encountered Altadenans with their backs up.

Having grown up in the unincorporated foothill community, I’ve seen it all my life.

In 1956, months after I was born, the community formally rejected the last of many annexation attempts by Baja Altadena; the city of Pasadena.

In the early ‘60s, I went door-to-door in our East Loma Alta Drive with my mother, carrying an anti-incorporation petition, and that effort failed too.

Altadena didn’t want to be part of Pasadena, and it didn’t make economic sense to incorporate as a city of its own, with a small retail base.

But Altadena’s fierce, almost rural forever-skepticism about more government — or more anything, other than raised-bed vegetable gardens and farmers’ markets — there is the real reason. When you’re overseen by the county, with its HQ 20 miles away in Downtown Los Angeles, let’s just say there aren’t so many inspectors making sure the gray water from your (organically soaped) washing machine isn’t being used to water your garden.

My garden at my last house in Altadena, way up on Alpine Villa Drive, with its backyard abutting the National Forest, certainly was watered that way, and no one said boo, because there was no one to do so. Just the way Altadenans like it.

Anyway, when Poly bought the Nuccio’s Nurseries’ land on Chaney Trail above Loma Alta west of Lake Avenue, and announced plans to build a big athletic center with lighted playing fields, the yard signs sprung up like mushrooms after a spring downpour in the San Gabriels.

Hundreds of them. All thumbs-down. You might call it the victory of the yard signs.

Poly is a great school and a great institution. Quite literally any parent in the world would want their kids to go there. That must be an amazing feeling, to be the Harvard of the K-12s. And yet, amazingly, Poly also cultivates a culture of modesty and community service.

And school leadership did that culture proud when it decided not to get into what would have been an extended land-use fight with the Altadenans, who certainly were not going anywhere, and not about to back down. Even if Poly in the end might have won that fight in the county planning process, the victory wouldn’t have been worth it. You don’t want the soccer moms rushing up Lake and over Loma Alta to face an ornery demo of locals every single day. It just wouldn’t do. And it didn’t do.

Great schools want and deserve great playing fields and training facilities. Poly’s neighborhood is built out. But it will find something, somewhere, or in conjunction with its neighbor Caltech, that will work for the student-athletes.

On Oct. 8, Poly issued a statement about what it had dubbed PolyFields: “Ultimately, the site proved to be too complex. Infrastructure, engineering, and grading requirements drove the development costs to levels that were much higher than anticipated, and far beyond what we believe to be reasonable. The Board recognized it was simply not responsible or prudent to continue pursuing a plan that would require such a high level of financial investment, particularly as Poly has many other important priorities for funding.”

Congratulations to AltadenaWild and the other community groups involved. Personally, one wishes for the finest, most botanically important camellia nursery in the world to be revitalized on the site. That Nuccio’s Gem in your yard was probably hybridized there.

Go celebrate the latest Altadena victory along with the Los Angeles Dodgers at the new Good Neighbor Bar on Lincoln north of Woodbury. It’s standing-room only. April and Randy have created there the kind of sophisticated scene that didn’t exist in the Altadena of my childhood. But it’s the kind of change for the better that Altadenans can rally behind.

Wednesday at random

Pasadena voters I’ve talked to seem a bit freaked out by the mailer for Measure PL that shows an AI-generated photo of Central Library destroyed by an earthquake. It’s an amazingly real-seeming biblio disaster. Talk about politics tugging at the heartstrings!

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.